No this isn't a post about how to use the current command line interfaces, which are power and cool, but insanely unintuitive for the average joe.
This post is about the command line making a comeback, after being shoved away into a corner by its bigger, better, more popular cousin, the graphical user interface. I stumbled on to an article titled "
Command Line for the Common Man: The Command Line Comeback" [via
SvN].
What it says is quite true - slowly, but surely the command line is becoming more relevant to our lives (assuming we're not all geeky linux nerds, or poor sysadmins trapped in a dingy room surrounded by servers). Not in the form that we all despise, but it has morphed. Chances are, you won't have even realised you're using it. Website URLs are one example, or when you're searching google, especially when you use its
oneBox keywords.
All the major operating systems have built in search engines too - Vista, Windows Desktop Search; Mac, Spotlight; Linux, Beagle. And utilities like
Quicksilver for Mac, and
Launchy for Windows take this concept even further.
I agree with most of the article (except when it used Office icons as an example - check out Office 2007's new ribbon; obviously Microsoft's picked up on the ambiguity of some of its icons). It is very powerful, but the problem is remember the commands. Look at the weird command utilities in both Windows and Linux - hardcore users aside, you'd be hardpressed to find someone who could tell you what all the various switches for the copy/cp command are. Unleashing this power to the user is a great step forward, but typing and talking aside, which is what the article suggested, I think an even more powerful way to harness the power right now (i.e. without the perfect language understanding that computers will have in the future), is to offer Intellisense style prompting. Better yet, help the user 'build' the command string by showing them a list of common commands and letting them pick the required switches. Imagine if you took the CounterStrike style of numerically numbered menu items and implemented it here - you could just press 1-2-5 and have a blank email ready to be typed in. So much faster than typing in 'open blank email'.
Words still have a role in it of course, especially when you're searching for something. But menus ultimately save users that much more time by not having to remember the keywords. Then again, google's already shown that it is possible to parse a lot of our natural language requests into actions, so it probably won't be long until this picks up. The command line won't get to exact the ultimate revenge to its GUI cousin, but it'll make the playing field much more even.