Command Line and User Friendliness • Hacker News Board

Re: Command Line and User Friendliness

#21

Post by dgoodlad » Thu, May 31, 2012, 4:32 AM UTC

grannyg00se wrote: post #17

"You type something in, and the machine either executes your command, or goes “I have no clue what you just said, did you by any chance mean XYZ?”" What sort of wizardry is this? My shell (BASH) does not say "did you by any chance mean XYZ?" It stops after saying "I have no clue what you just said" and then stares at me like I'm an idiot.

Zsh has an autocorrect feature that suggests different spellings of your command if it can't find anything exactly matching it. I'm sure that I recall hearing of similar functionality available for bash, too.

Also, recent versions of Ubuntu include shell aliases that will search for packages related to missing commands. I'm sure that if you don't use Ubuntu, you could rip this functionality out and port it to whatever packaging system you use.

Re: Command Line and User Friendliness

#22

Post by unimpressive » Thu, May 31, 2012, 4:32 AM UTC

grannyg00se wrote: post #17

"You type something in, and the machine either executes your command, or goes “I have no clue what you just said, did you by any chance mean XYZ?”" What sort of wizardry is this? My shell (BASH) does not say "did you by any chance mean XYZ?" It stops after saying "I have no clue what you just said" and then stares at me like I'm an idiot.

>What sort of wizardry is this?

  [Redacted]@[Redacted]:~$ nncat
  No command 'nncat' found, did you mean:
   Command 'sncat' from package 'sn' (universe)
   Command 'ncat' from package 'nmap' (main)
   Command 'uncat' from package 'socklog' (universe)
  nncat: command not found

Re: Command Line and User Friendliness

#23

Post by jonathansizz » Thu, May 31, 2012, 4:34 AM UTC

underwater wrote: post #18

The command line may be efficient, but it is far from intuitive. I work with command line tools every day, and I am still constantly searching Google and man pages whenever I need to do something outside of my normal flow.

That's also what happens to me quite frequently -- when I'm using a GUI.

Re: Command Line and User Friendliness

#24

Post by robbiemitchell » Thu, May 31, 2012, 4:38 AM UTC

kevinconroy wrote: post #10

Twitter is effectively a CLI. Posts that start with "D" form a direct message rather than normal status update. You can also issue other commands which follow people, edit your profile, and more. http://support.twitter.com/articles/14020-twitter-sms-comman...

It's a CLI with terrible feedback. So many people (including people whose jobs are in some way related to Twitter) don't know that when you start a message with an @reply, only your followers who also follow that other person will see it.

A few years back, when more people used the SMS interface to post, it was common to see people occasionally slip and post what was supposed to be a direct message. I don't see that anymore now that people use GUIs.

Re: Command Line and User Friendliness

#25

Post by minikomi » Thu, May 31, 2012, 4:39 AM UTC

kevinconroy wrote: post #13

Agree that CLI are powerful but also scary to novice users. So who's going to make cliacademy.com to ensure that everyone learns how to use a CLI?

Who's going to make a lighttable for the CLI?

Re: Command Line and User Friendliness

#26

Post by saraid216 » Thu, May 31, 2012, 4:57 AM UTC

What I think would be interesting would be some strongly-coupled CLI-GUI interactions. For instance, let's take Word as a start. What if you could swap to your CLI and say "load letter template" and it would walk over to Word and do that for you in the GUI? Or in Excel, instead of clicking through the charting wizard, instead have a CLI that lets you configure the options at will?

I think that would be the next greatest thing in non-mobile What I think would be interesting would be some strongly-coupled CLI-GUI interactions. For instance, let's take Word as a start. What if you could swap to your CLI and say "load letter template" and it would walk over to Word and do that for you in the GUI? Or in Excel, instead of clicking through the charting wizard, instead have a CLI that lets you configure the options at will?

I think that would be the next greatest thing in non-mobile UI design. (But I'm a heavy CLI user, so I'm kinda biased.)

Re: Command Line and User Friendliness

#27

Post by dllthomas » Thu, May 31, 2012, 4:59 AM UTC

underwater wrote: post #18

The command line may be efficient, but it is far from intuitive. I work with command line tools every day, and I am still constantly searching Google and man pages whenever I need to do something outside of my normal flow.

How is checking a man page logically different than digging through menus? Either you know how to do what you want to do, or you need to find out how, regardless of your interface.

Re: Command Line and User Friendliness

#28

Post by saraid216 » Thu, May 31, 2012, 5:02 AM UTC

robbiemitchell wrote: post #24

kevinconroy wrote: post #10

Twitter is effectively a CLI. Posts that start with "D" form a direct message rather than normal status update. You can also issue other commands which follow people, edit your profile, and more. http://support.twitter.com/articles/14020-twitter-sms-comman...

It's a CLI with terrible feedback. So many people (including people whose jobs are in some way related to Twitter) don't know that when you start a message with an @reply, only your followers who also follow that other person will see it. A few years back, when more people used the SMS interface to post, it was common to see people occasionally slip and post what was supposed to be a direct message. I don't see that…

There was a lovely gaffe last year when @neilhimself accidentally did a public tweet of his hotel phone number in what was supposed to be a DM to his wife.

Also, I did not know that about the @reply. Twitter needs to come with a --help.

Re: Command Line and User Friendliness

#29

Post by dllthomas » Thu, May 31, 2012, 5:07 AM UTC

Good, as far as it goes, but misses (IMHO) the biggest advantage of the shell, which is composability. In the shell, you can interleave and connect any actions you have access to. In the GUI, programs can typically only interact in ways explicitly supported.

Re: Command Line and User Friendliness

#30

Post by jasomill » Thu, May 31, 2012, 5:09 AM UTC

marknadal wrote: post #2

But you are missing something... Try photo manipulation with a CLI. Art requires spatial interaction, not merely "conversational" expressions.

Not just art. Try writing and editing text with nothing but shell tools.

One thing that I'd love to see in all GUIs is a unified "search box" for commands, settings, and tasks. The OS X help menu comes close (but it only searches help and menu bar items); the "Control-Q" box in the Visual Studio 11 beta comes even closer (but it only works in Visual Studio).

Neither, however, go beyond basic substring matching, and they really should. As an example, help searching for "disable Flash" in Safari could easily point me to the appropriate preference pane and the Safari extensions Web site before falling back to a general Web search as a last resort.