The Linux Revolution: What Happened 4329

Jeff

Maybe I'm entirely arcane, but for me text interface is the only interface that gives me control and flexibility. There are just so many things you can't easily do using a point-and-click interface - just the simplest thing of it all, pressing Ctrl-R to search for the command history and repeating (eventually slightly modifying) an earlier typed command - there is no such equivalent with point-and-click interfaces.

After all, what one needs for having control of the computer is a basic ability to program - and as far as I know, there are no good programming languages as of today that doesn't rely on a text interface. Bash is as much a programming langauge as an interface for launching programs. Of course, one have to be very send to take full advantage of it, but there is quite some simple stuff that can be done by ordinary people; i.e. chaining commands, i.e. "copy images from camera; start image viewer" or "copy images from camera to disk; burn images to CD".

The first digital camera I had was boundled with some software for transfering images to the computer; it was crap. It was a point-and-click interface, and for every image it downloaded, the image would pop up at the screen disturbing whatever kind of work I was trying to do. The program had options for "take image" and "delete image from camera", but I didn't see the point at all, it was much faster to do those operations from the camera itself than to do it through the mouse and the program. But then I found a command line tool for it, I got an idea, and within a minute I had set up a loop "take picture; transfer image to web; delete image from camera; sleep 30" - and presto, I had a web camera throwing live pictures at the web. How do you do that with a point-and-click interface? I think the average windows user would search for a separate "webcam"-program to do that. Now, if the camera can be accessed through the command line, it's not needed to be any expert to fix the 5-line webcam program above - but as long as the camera can only be accessed through pointing and clicking (or the buttons at the camera itself), one will need an expert to fix the task.

Or, when my wife wants to send pictures by email, she carefully selects the fotos she wants to send, open each and one of them in photoshop, asks fotoshop to resize the photo, and sends it. That's the typical point-and-click way of doing things - maybe there exists some smart functionality in photoshop for "resize n photos" or some other applications for this, but that's not the point. When I do the same operation, I use command-line tools for resizing the photo, even if the command works for a single photo at a time, it's completely trivial to fix "resize all the selected photos" in one go, not having to do repeated time-consuming work (that's what we have the computer for, after all, isn't it?).

It seems to me that most people, even including quite some computer-literate people, consider point-and-click interfaces to be much easier to use than the command line. Yes, indeed, doing advanced stuff on the command line does require some knowledge, and manual pages are quite often difficult to digest - but the simplest of the simple - to launch an application - well, if I come to a computer where I expect "firefox" to be installed, all I have to do is to type "firefox" in a terminal window. That's not difficult, and it does not take much time to do. Searching for the right place to click with the mouse can be very time-consuming and frustrating.

-- Tobias Brox, Troms¿, Arctic Norway