Just a thought provoked by Ten's question/aside

There really is nothing inherently bad or unusable about consoles.

As an aside, there's *got* to be some way to remove the fear of the console

for the average user. Whether it's consoles in funky anti-aliased truetype fonts with images/music/css theming/whatever in a gnome/kde app, or even turing-type rubber-fork "find me the mp3s I saved in july last year" type stuff, if we could just crack this heinous culture that's built up against using fast, expressive, intuitive typed commands, then people would REALLY

be

moving to linux.

I use two stats programs, SPSS and STATA, which have GUI interfaces that have grown over the years and versions on top of command line origins. Both preserve full access to command line flexibility and to different extents encourage users to use that interface as they gain experience. The key enabling factor is that in both systems it is very easy to access the commands generated by using menus and dialogues. STATA is particularly good at this, reporting the the plain-text command equivalent with every set of results, whether generated via console or point-and-squirt. There is also an on-screen history of commands in a separate window along with another showing available variables. Items can be grabbed from either source to construct new console entries. This works the other way too, with a CLI command that shows you the GUI way of issuing. When I introduce a class to the package I can just give them the true-and-pure commands and they have the security of knowing how to get back to a GUI method too.

Come to think of it there must be many other models of GUI/CLI integration like this in various applications. I'm sure others on this list will know dozens. But has it been done in an OS yet, or could a desktop environment just superimpose this behaviour? Could something provide the user with a console window that is, for example, filled in with the appropriate mnt/ls and so on commands when they stick a disk in?

Rob

Rob Grant Tutor in Economics School of Development Studies University of East Anglia NR4 7TJ +44(0)1603592324 r.grant@uea.ac.uk