Re: Questions

[Mihai BAZON <mbazon websci ro>]

Me loves CLI not because took me so long to learn it well (although it
was pretty much time), but because once learned is what I call "the bear
power" :) -- I can do things *much faster* than using UI.  I use X
because Emacs looks better with syntax highlighting.

Cheers
-Mishoo

On Tue, 22 May 2001, delmar watkins wrote:

> I think that the system I laid out would be good for both the beginning CLI
> user, teh advanced CLI user, and voice recognition.
>
> You could say things like, "list all files in my home".  To parse that, you
> would basically get rid of "in" and basically the command goes to "li -af
> /home/user" or "list all files /home/user"
>
> In other words, you would need a synthetic language, but it could act very
> "natural" because the syntax would be updated.  Alo, the actual command itself
> would be a real, "english" (or German, or French... or whatever) word that can
> be abbreviated for power users, but is immediately obvious to non-power users.
> Sorry, "ls" is *NOT* user friendly, and neither are its arguments.
>
> We CLI UNIX geeks only know and love CLI because of a long and laborious
> learning process. The easier you make the process of learning CLI, the more
> people you get to use it, and the more powerful the computer becomes.   I love
> CLI, I think the it is the best interface there is.  But until CLI feels more
> like a 4GL than a 3GL,  and until the current syntax is left behind, we are
> really never going to convince anyone in the general public that CLI is better
> than a GUI.
>
> Now, if I only knew more C instead of Java and Perl, I would rewrite the whole
> thing :-)
>
> If anyone is interesting in making a project based on what I've said, though,
> I would be happy to help (heck, I'd even learn C to do it!), but thus far
> I have never gotten a positive response for people wanting to change the CLI
> interface.
>
> "Michael T. Babcock" wrote:
>
> > > Seriously, I see no reason why we can't have a new CLI syntax.  Basically,
> > > some one (or some grop) simply needs to come up with a more up-to-date
> > > language syntax for CLI.  It does not have to be artificially intelligent,
> > > becuase let's face it, natural language is WAAAY too hard to parse.  But
> > at
> > > the very least it could be helpful and clear.
> >
> > If you want to make something useful, make a series of commands that
> > interpret whole-word commands into actual unix command-lines for use with
> > voice recognition software.
> >
> > Saying "list files in slash usr slash lib" is easier than "spell
> > L-S-SPACE-SLASH KEY-U-" ... ;-)
> >
> > All that needs doing is writing programs by the names of things like "list"
> > and "open" and "run" which interpret the command lines after them and exec
> > the interpreted result.
> >
> > "list files in home" -- ls ~
> > "open file number three" -- take 3rd file from listing, check mime exec and
> > run it or give error.
> >
> > --
> > Michael T. Babcock
> > CTO, FibreSpeed
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > gnome-gui-list mailing list
> > gnome-gui-list gnome org
> > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-gui-list
>