| I agree with you and disagree at the same time. Command line interfaces are extremely powerful, simple to implement, extend and leverage, but, GUI's have their own advantages mainly in information density, context clues, and ease of operation. There is a world for them to both live in, but I would disagree with OP's approach of bring graphics to command line and suggest the approach of bringing command lines to GUIs. I have already embedded a command line terminal in several GUI's I've built for industrial machines. The users can see the corresponding command line command pop up in the terminal when they click a GUI button and are free to type commands into the terminal. They can also define a script or batch of commands and easily assign it to a GUI button. It was amazingly efficient for engineers to work with prototype machines whose functionality and controls were constantly in flux. Downsides are that exposing a terminal to a potentially non-expert operator is a potentially dangerous, and I had to spend a good deal of time validating and sanitizing inputs(and risk missing something). In the end, the terminal was removed in the production GUI, but was extremely helpful in the creation of a functional GUI that worked for the operator, rather than the opposite. In the case where the operator is always going to be an expert and is working with a complicated or constantly changing process, I could see a CLI/GUI interface working well. |