Re: Questions



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
>
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> gnome-gui-list mailing list
> gnome-gui-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-gui-list

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