[saraid216]

What I think would be interesting would be some strongly-coupled CLI-GUI interactions. For instance, let's take Word as a start. What if you could swap to your CLI and say "load letter template" and it would walk over to Word and do that for you in the GUI? Or in Excel, instead of clicking through the charting wizard, instead have a CLI that lets you configure the options at will?

I think that would be the next greatest thing in non-mobile What I think would be interesting would be some strongly-coupled CLI-GUI interactions. For instance, let's take Word as a start. What if you could swap to your CLI and say "load letter template" and it would walk over to Word and do that for you in the GUI? Or in Excel, instead of clicking through the charting wizard, instead have a CLI that lets you configure the options at will?

I think that would be the next greatest thing in non-mobile UI design. (But I'm a heavy CLI user, so I'm kinda biased.)

[dllthomas]

This is supported by some individual applications. For instance, firefox will let you open a new tab in a running browser, ratpoison will let you run a bunch of commands against it, etc.

I'm still not thrilled because it's usually still difficult to move data the other way (although xclip or xsel can certainly help).

[quesera]

AutoCAD has a simultaneous GUI and CLI. SketchUp has a partial implementation of a similar model.

You could argue that Vi and emacs do both. Certainly the primary mode is a (curses-based) GUI, and the command modes operate on the same data. They're not quite always-on, but close enough.

I often wish more applications would do this!

[dave1010uk]

I believe this is the idea behind Ubuntu's HUD: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/939

[ricardobeat]

AppleScript?