Does the commend line scare you?

[porcorosso]

Eh, to each his own.

But I do have to say that it's the GUI that I find scary. Let's take Windows Explorer, for instance. There I am moving my mouse cursor over the folder list. I sneeze or somethin distracts me, and the old index finger hits that left mouse button. Huh? Did something move? Did I just accidentally drag-n-drop one folder into another?

I tiptoe through Program Files and system directories in Windows Eplorer like I was walking on egg shells. And if I even have an inkling that I may have made a misstep with that pesky mouse, I check Explorer's Edit menu to see if there's an UNDO MOVE in there. If there is, I click the sucker!

However much trouble some people may have with a CLI, it ain't highly likely that they'll accidentally drop the entire C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\ folder into C:\WINDOWS\system32\DirectX by mistake. (No, it didn't happen to me, but it did happen to a friend.)

Now, on the other hand, I've found that using keyboard shortcuts within the GUI in various Windows Server admin tools can be fast and efficient. Haven't had any problems with missteps there. But that little rodent can be a bastard.

 

[nismotigerwvu]

It all depends on what you learned with....my first computer was a 286 so obviously i learned with a CLI...i really do miss the speed and simplicity of DOS

 

[legacyNW]

A subtle form of mockery - indeed, yuo are correct. There will always be CLIs (trust me...every box has a backdoor) because for programming debugging lab use, you need one. Too hard to program a GUI for every damn thing you need to know, like tracing code execution (usually done in memory in a ring buffer you can dump).

And as long as there are people who truly understand the computer, and know how to talk to it, they will use their knowledge as a form of social differentiation.

Hey, rich hollywood types wear shoes that cost $4000 and drive cars worh more than my house to intimiadte the masses, geeks throw batch files & perl scripts around. typical human behavior. Back in 10,000 BC the hot thing was probably a necklace of lion's teeth (from lions you killed personally, of course).

 

[legacyNW]

" it ain't highly likely that they'll accidentally drop the entire C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\ folder into C:\WINDOWS\system32\DirectX by mistake. (No, it didn't happen to me, but it did happen to a friend.)"

hilarious..yeah I can't count how many times freaking Explorer jerked the scroll around and I ended up dropping a folder God knows where....back in the day (SunOs had a lousy file mgr) I used aliases for cmdline scripts to do that, never had that problem.

 

[bersl2]

Originally posted by: Markbnj

My point is that the vast majority of people don't encounter lots of problems. Doesn't mean that being able to attack problems creatively isn't usefull and that is what the command line provides over a GUI.

I think "you guys" always miss the point. Computers are now appliances, well on their way to disappearing into the woodwork alltogether. In a decade or two you won't even see them on the desktop. A decade or two after that you won't even know where the computer is anymore. Yes, for engineers and operating system designers, and who knows what other groups of people command line interfaces may still be useful. Nobody else will use them, ever again.

:disgust:

Of course the CLI is not practical for lowest-common-denominator users. The point is that the CLI be available to everyone who wants to use it. You can always layer a GUI as a frontend to whatever you want, but it is important that everything be doable from the command line for scripting purposes. When it comes to the back end, it should be as engineer-friendly as possible; the end user be damned!

 

[xtknight]

Wtf is this stuff about intimidating users? What does that have to do with anything? If you have a god complex maybe that's the case, but some of us just wish to do things the way that makes the most sense.

The bottom line is, with the bundled command line I can copy all files that contain "media" to a different folder, and there is no easy way to do that with the Explorer GUIs that come with Windows or Linux.

Using a GUI to do that is like bringing up the character map so you can type your password without using your keyboard. It's just stupid. If it's a GUI it's gotta be easier right?

Edit: OK, so you can use Edit->Select Pattern in Nautilus. Windows doesn't have that, and you get my point, using the GUI for some things just don't make sense.

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: Markbnj

My point is that the vast majority of people don't encounter lots of problems. Doesn't mean that being able to attack problems creatively isn't usefull and that is what the command line provides over a GUI.

I think "you guys" always miss the point. Computers are now appliances, well on their way to disappearing into the woodwork alltogether. In a decade or two you won't even see them on the desktop.

They've already tried 'Computers as appliances' before. Many times. Not that usefull. You just end up something that costs more and does less.

General purpose devices will always be around and be superior for most tasks. Sure the desktop days are numbered, and you may not know were the compuer is located.. but that doesn't mean anything. Half of the time I am not within ten miles of the computers I'm working on.

The future is going to end up with applications that are divorced from your hardware and display independant. Systems were you can drop kick your terminal out the window or set your mobile device on fire, go out and buy a new one, and have all your stuff already there with no data loss. All sorts of crazy stuff.

 

[INM8]

When using linux I use the command line 90% of the time, mainly because it is so easy , powerfull, and flexible. Funnily enough, the windows equivilant drives me nuts, so I only use it when I have to.

 

[drag]

Ya it's a bit funny. Windows realy sucks the life out of my command line usage. I only use it for checking network configurations (since I always have a hell of a time finding were that stuff is stored in the various wizards and device dialog do-hickies) and doing odd stuff like extracting replacement libs from the i386 folder and such when cleaning up spyware or whatnot.

Don't get me wrong though, I don't think Unix shell the way it is now is good enough for 10% of the people who could take advantage of a good shell.. It's still way to cryptic, but the command line in Linux is progressing decently and people are always experimenting with new shells and such.

For instance one newer shell that is aiming for more user friendliness is 'fish' (Freindly Interactive SHell.)
http://roo.no-ip.org/fish/

It tries to improve on traditional C and Sh style shells by doing things like:
tab autocomplete everything. Autocomplete intellegently file types, commands, command options, etc etc.
making sure that all commands have help features and that redundant or too similar commands are eliminated to try to make things simplier.
integration with the X clipboard when X is aviable for copy and pasting.
and extra stuff like the 'open' command that works with the .desktop specifications for determining program and mime types.

So for instance if you have Gimp setup as default for all jpeg files:
open filename.jpg
will check to make sure that it's realy a jpeg file and then open gimp and have gimp open up that image file.

Stuff like that.

Not that it's perfect or anything, but I like the idea of trying to make that sort of thing easier and make the command line more user-friendly.

In fact it seems like the way things are going your going to see your 'desktop' motif with 'files as pages', 'directories as folders', and 'drives as filing cabinates' GUI abstraction stuff going away long before not to long. Or at least getting minimalized.

I like stuff like this:
http://macslow.thepimp.net/?page_id=18

 

[nweaver]

Yes, it's interesting how windows tried to kill off the command line, only to revamp it by adding different shells (netsh) and recoding it (monad) and then touting it as a "feature"

 

[JonnyBlaze]

i started with dos long before windows. i love the command line.

 

[spikespiegal]

it ain't highly likely that they'll accidentally drop the entire C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\ folder into C:\WINDOWS\system32\DirectX by mistake. (No, it didn't happen to me, but it did happen to a friend.)

Wow...that's so funny. Yet another computer noob that lives and breathes logged onto their computer with admin rights. Why are you bothering with command line anyway when you should be using Win98?

As for command line vs gui, try flushing DNS with a GUI option or trying to find it. Setting time to a specific server, doing attrib commands, netstat, etc.

I still get a bang out of 'admins' and workstation techs that insist on browsing through network'hood looking for server shares vs simply going to the run line and typing \\%servername%.

Start>Run services.msc, compmgmt.msc, etc.You'd rather hunt for that junk in control panel?

God bless the Linux folks who are slick enough to set up file permissions and ACLs from a command line.

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: nweaver
Yes, it's interesting how windows tried to kill off the command line, only to revamp it by adding different shells (netsh) and recoding it (monad) and then touting it as a "feature"

We never tried to "kill" the command line. No functionality was ever removed. We just found that as we added new features it was better to do it in the gui than in command line. We are now going back and adding the GUI stuff back to command line to facilitate scripting, headless boxes etc..

Netsh is a great example of this. It's 10 kinds of awful hassle getting crap done in there when compared to the GUI. ... it can be scripted though

A file rename with a wildcard though? some stuff is just meant for command line.


uh, question though. Why should it not be "touted as a feature?"

 

[Nothinman]

Netsh is a great example of this. It's 10 kinds of awful hassle getting crap done in there when compared to the GUI. ... it can be scripted though

If the people that wrote it find it complicated that means there's something wrong with your CLI then. Same thing goes for PowerShell (gay name btw), I installed it and started playing with it but it's a PITA to figure out how to do simple things that I'm used to in bash. I realize there's going to be some learning curve but it just seems over engineered to the extreme.

 

[corkyg]

Like most anything - that with which you are not familiar can be intimidating, GUI or command line. I recall the command line as an efficient friend because that's all we had in the early 80s. The GUIs made things visual, and allowed users to be somewhat dumbed down. Some are even frightened of using a mouse.

Command line literacy today is definitely a less used asset, but nonetheless, it is an asset.

 

[aux]

No, it doesn't scare me.

Where is the poll?

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Netsh is a great example of this. It's 10 kinds of awful hassle getting crap done in there when compared to the GUI. ... it can be scripted though

If the people that wrote it find it complicated that means there's something wrong with your CLI then. Same thing goes for PowerShell (gay name btw), I installed it and started playing with it but it's a PITA to figure out how to do simple things that I'm used to in bash. I realize there's going to be some learning curve but it just seems over engineered to the extreme.

It seems to me that powershell is more intended to be a straight scripting language rather then realy something you'd use day to day.

For instance you have the python shell which I suppose you could use a shell provided you setup (so you could do stuff like naturally execute commands and tools in your paths) the environment correctly and wrote functions for common shell-provided commands.

Although it's just the impression that I get from reading about it since I haven't had a chance to try it out myself yet.

 

[Raduque]

Originally posted by: aux
No, it doesn't scare me.

Where is the poll?

Yea, we need a poll.

CLI doesn't scare me, I just don't want it anymore. I used it tons back in the days of DOS 5 and 6, and I'm very lazy, so I much prefer to just click on things

I can still bust out some CLI skills when I need to though.

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: Markbnj

My point is that the vast majority of people don't encounter lots of problems. Doesn't mean that being able to attack problems creatively isn't usefull and that is what the command line provides over a GUI.

I think "you guys" always miss the point. Computers are now appliances, well on their way to disappearing into the woodwork alltogether. In a decade or two you won't even see them on the desktop. A decade or two after that you won't even know where the computer is anymore. Yes, for engineers and operating system designers, and who knows what other groups of people command line interfaces may still be useful. Nobody else will use them, ever again. The only people who think that CLIs will remain relevant are a small portion of tech-savvy 'puter geeks (i.e., the "Linux community") who, deep down inside, love the idea of a cryptic interface that few people understand. Every now and then one of them likes to hold it up and say "Look, this isn't that scary, is it?" They do this not to promote the use of the CLI among the non tech-savvy, which would ultimately not be to their liking, but rather to enjoy the horrified looks on the faces of ordinary users. It is a subtle form of mockery .

Um, wow. My wife (about the most computer-scared person I know) understood it when I showed her that you can just type 'calc' and get the calculator or 'notepad' and get the notepad, instead of drilling down through the start menu. Does that scare YOU?

 

[Robor]

The command line is our friend. Embrace it!

 

[Markbnj]

Originally posted by: Brazen

Originally posted by: Markbnj

My point is that the vast majority of people don't encounter lots of problems. Doesn't mean that being able to attack problems creatively isn't usefull and that is what the command line provides over a GUI.

I think "you guys" always miss the point. Computers are now appliances, well on their way to disappearing into the woodwork alltogether. In a decade or two you won't even see them on the desktop. A decade or two after that you won't even know where the computer is anymore. Yes, for engineers and operating system designers, and who knows what other groups of people command line interfaces may still be useful. Nobody else will use them, ever again. The only people who think that CLIs will remain relevant are a small portion of tech-savvy 'puter geeks (i.e., the "Linux community") who, deep down inside, love the idea of a cryptic interface that few people understand. Every now and then one of them likes to hold it up and say "Look, this isn't that scary, is it?" They do this not to promote the use of the CLI among the non tech-savvy, which would ultimately not be to their liking, but rather to enjoy the horrified looks on the faces of ordinary users. It is a subtle form of mockery .

Um, wow. My wife (about the most computer-scared person I know) understood it when I showed her that you can just type 'calc' and get the calculator or 'notepad' and get the notepad, instead of drilling down through the start menu. Does that scare YOU?

OMG yes it does. If she can get to calc so easily, who knows where it will end! So, it's easier for her to click start, type 'cmd', click ok, type 'calc', and hit return than it is to click start, click all programs, click accesories, and click calculator? Or you put an icon on the desktop for cmd.exe, and she double clicks that? Or maybe you just have cmd.exe running all the time? What about programs whose binaries are not on the path?

Contrived examples ftw.

 

[xtknight]

cmd and then calc? You don't need the cmd in there.

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: Markbnj

Originally posted by: Brazen

Originally posted by: Markbnj

My point is that the vast majority of people don't encounter lots of problems. Doesn't mean that being able to attack problems creatively isn't usefull and that is what the command line provides over a GUI.

I think "you guys" always miss the point. Computers are now appliances, well on their way to disappearing into the woodwork alltogether. In a decade or two you won't even see them on the desktop. A decade or two after that you won't even know where the computer is anymore. Yes, for engineers and operating system designers, and who knows what other groups of people command line interfaces may still be useful. Nobody else will use them, ever again. The only people who think that CLIs will remain relevant are a small portion of tech-savvy 'puter geeks (i.e., the "Linux community") who, deep down inside, love the idea of a cryptic interface that few people understand. Every now and then one of them likes to hold it up and say "Look, this isn't that scary, is it?" They do this not to promote the use of the CLI among the non tech-savvy, which would ultimately not be to their liking, but rather to enjoy the horrified looks on the faces of ordinary users. It is a subtle form of mockery .

Um, wow. My wife (about the most computer-scared person I know) understood it when I showed her that you can just type 'calc' and get the calculator or 'notepad' and get the notepad, instead of drilling down through the start menu. Does that scare YOU?

OMG yes it does. If she can get to calc so easily, who knows where it will end! So, it's easier for her to click start, type 'cmd', click ok, type 'calc', and hit return than it is to click start, click all programs, click accesories, and click calculator? Or you put an icon on the desktop for cmd.exe, and she double clicks that? Or maybe you just have cmd.exe running all the time? What about programs whose binaries are not on the path?

Contrived examples ftw.

Yes, clicking Start > Run, typing calc is way faster than clicking down through the start menu. And most, or least some, people don't like having an icon for every single program on their desktop.

What about programs whose binaries are not on the path?

Well, you could use the command line, or some other method. You see, just because you use the command line for some things doesn't mean you have to use it for every thing. I know, I know, this requires some thinking; don't hurt yourself trying to figure it out. If you are going to spend 5 minutes thinking "oh man, should I use the command line or the GUI" then maybe it would indeed be a good idea for you to just use the GUI exclusively.

 

[Markbnj]

Well, you could use the command line, or some other method. You see, just because you use the command line for some things doesn't mean you have to use it for every thing. I know, I know, this requires some thinking; don't hurt yourself trying to figure it out. If you are going to spend 5 minutes thinking "oh man, should I use the command line or the GUI" then maybe it would indeed be a good idea for you to just use the GUI exclusively.

Yeah, I think I will use the GUI exclusively. I never had much practice using a command line interface. I mean, back in 1975 when I started programming we used teletypes and paper tape for storage. Didn't get much CLI experience then. Later when I was writing assembler programs for DOS on a Columbia XT I really struggled to master typing all those words and command line switches. Arggh. Probably about that same time you were learning not to crap yourself, so I guess we were both going through tough times then. But fortunately Windows came along and I started writing code for it about version 2. I was saved.

 

[daniel49]

scare,,,No
annoy...sometimes.