On Wednesday 25 October 2006 16:36, Frank Barknecht wrote:
> If you want to print or if you want to run a word count, if
> you want to upload with scp or whatever: It's all there. To my
> knowledge the command line is the most flexible and powerful
> "context menu" invented so far.
I've been using Unix for 20 years and Linux for 12, so for me,
yeah, I probably use the command line more than the context
menus. But we're not talking about you or me, we're talking
about people who are using "something else" and who thinks
visually (a GNOME developer would say spatially, but I don't
necessarily agree) rather than in code.
Even for my own purposes, I end up in the GUI a lot even if it's
just mc or rox (if I'm using icewm.) Suppose I want to burn
600MB of the largest files (out of a directory containing
hundreds of files and several gigs) to a CD. This is something
I do fairly often, with various changes to the criteria, in both
my personal life and business. Click the Size column, start
dragging until the file manager tells me I've got 600MB,
right-click, "Actions/Create Data CD" (under KDE, dunno about
GNOME since I haven't been using it long.) To select those
files at the command line, I would have to sit there and read
man pages for far longer than it would take to burn the actual
CD. I'd probably end up writing a perl one-liner that called
mkisofs and cdrecord.
Suppose I want to delete all the files I created since midnight
in a directory.... I could try to do it from memory
("find -mmin -1200 -type f | xargs rm -f" as I type this,
roughly, right? but I'd run it without the "rm" first just to
be sure...) or I could do it in like 10 seconds by sorting by
date in the file manager, selecting and deleting.
More relevant to this list, ever tried to use mp3cut and xmms
from the command line to trim an mp3 file? I personally find it
annoying, and will put up with an additional encoding generation
just to open the file in Audacity and see the waveform as I'm
trimming it. Needless to say, I've never even used command line
tools to trim a wav file, since there's no downside to using
Audacity.
People who aren't coders or admins usually don't even have the
option to remember the commands we learned years ago, and even
if someone taught them, most people just don't think that way.
The only way most people are even able to use computers is to
think of directories and web pages as physical places, daemons
and files as physical objects, and their dragging and dropping
as literal physical actions rather than a metaphor.
In summary: "Well, the command line works fine for me" is not a
valid counter-argument to "I want to be able to tell my
non-technical users that they'll never have to use a command
line."
Rob
Received on Thu Oct 26 08:15:19 2006
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