| " are fundamentally a better input interface for expert operations than the mouse/trackpad/pointer (with a rasterised but basically more analog feel that makes me "look where I'm going")." This is fundamentally incorrect. See the millions of Photoshop, Visual Studio, Notepad++, GEdit, Eclipse, Microsoft Office, Autodesk, Blender, Visio, Labview, Mathematica, Quickbooks, SAP, Oracle and other users of proprietary application-specific software. Do those users consider themselves to be experts? Do the accountants working at your company consider themselves to be experts? Do you really believe they would be more productive if they had to work in a terminal all day? ------------- Um, isn’t that particular quote you have there about keyboards vs. mice, rather than command-line vs. GUI? (Next paragraph he talks a bit about one advantage of command-line, but it is a different point than this one). Expert photoshop users rely quite heavily on the keyboard (keyboard shortcuts specifically), for many operations. The mouse is also used heavily, of course. The keyboard just can’t select portions of an image very effectively, or help you point at a pixel you want different, etc. Whenever I see a Photoshop expert do something to the image, though, they’ve used the keyboard, where beginner users (like me) just use the mouse. For most of the others, I expect expert X users are similar to expert Photoshop users. Then there are the rest, which are very text-oriented and therefore mostly keyboard-driven by default. On to the actual GUI-vs-command-line argument. You say “The way this works in interactive GUI applications is that they provide input forms and status indications to communicate with the user.” His argument was that this is less straightforward than just typing the arguments next to the command. I do not think you have refuted his point. The simple fact is that both interfaces have their places. I do a lot of work in both, and I think it will pretty much always be that way (for me). I do not think text-oriented command interfaces will go away while we still read & write, though hopefully they will indeed become friendlier with graphical interfaces. |