Usability of terminals [Re: [Usability] Running gnome-terminal as a desktop background]

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

This is a tangent, I'd rather be thinking about ways to improve the
graphical applications used by normal users but there are clearly many
people who want a better terminal and I did start so I suppose we may as
well discuss it now and get it out of the way for another few years.  (If
I recall correctly this kind of talk dominated the early incarnations of
this list.)

On Fri, 16 Sep 2005, Phil Bull wrote:

> Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2005 22:10:32 +0100
> From: Phil Bull <philbull gmail com>
> To: usability gnome org
> Subject: [Usability] Running gnome-terminal as a desktop background
>
> On Fri, 2005-09-16 at 03:39 +0100, Alan Horkan wrote:
>
> > I think we have serious problems if a user feels the need to resort to
> > the
> > command line on a regular basis.
>
> True. A lot of users don't know what a command line is, let alone how to
> use one.
>
> > I firmly believe a Desktop has failed if
> > you need to use the command line for ordinary use.
>
> Command lines are very powerful interfaces, and can be used to achieve
> many tasks simply, quickly and efficiently. For ordinary use, command
> lines could offer a lot of benefits to a user.

How come Gnome terminal doesn't have that feature warning you if you
mispell a command?  Played aroudn with a Mac and as terminals go I thought
it was pretty impressive way to improve usability.

> The problem is not that command lines are an inherently inferior way of
> interacting with a computer 'in ordinary use', it's that currently they
> aren't easy enough to use for a lot of people!

> A nice, simple, easy to use CLI, with a more natural syntax and more
> hinting would be ideal. I'd much rather type:
>
> get new mail

The original designers of unix have admitted they did go overboard on the
abbreviations.

You could probably setup aliases for that.

I think taking it further might alienate the very user who actually like
using a terminal.  Apparently there is already an "adventure shell" which
understands a syntax more like that seen in old adventure games.

> The closest thing we have to this at the moment is GNOME Command
> Interface, which to me looks very promising:
>
> http://www.stanford.edu/~dramage/gci/

Interesting.

> Equally, I think it should be possible to do many things without a
> graphical interface. Of course some things will always need a graphical
> UI, but for accessibility reasons it's always nice to have the keyboard
> there as a backup.

Well to a certain extent a curses interface is a graphical user interface
too.  Pine for example is a lot easier to use because it has a
command/menu bar which reduces the memory burden as opposed to mutt which
is powerful but not very user friendly.  Command line applications benefit
from having consitent arguements but many dont.  Many of the
usability lessons of the desktop and Graphical User Interfaces apply just
as much to command line interfaces only the audience is less demanding and
willing to work and learn if they believe it will save them work in the
long term, and they also tend to use computers often enough to be able to
memorise a large collection of commands.  (Apropos is one of the
greatest commadn line applications ever.)

- Alan