John Chambers wrote: >There has been some study of this sort of problem with the >advent of computer GUIs. Any study quickly proves that most >of the users use only a tiny fraction of the GUI's >capabilities. The reason is that they don't know about the >other semi-magical things that they could do. They don't >suspect that most of the capabilities even exist, and they >don't know how to ask or what to ask for. Watching someone >else doesn't help much, because you usually can't see what >they did with the keyboard or mouse, and you don't see any >pattern in what changes on the screen. And most of it isn't >documented anywhere. What documentation exists is mostly >incomprehensible to users.
While this is true to some extent of any computer system, it is much, much less of a problem with a GUI than it is with a command-line system. GUI-based programs have menus with meaningful words which describe the commands that they can execute. If you are looking for a way to perform some operation that you've never done before, you just pop up all the menus until something catches your eye which looks as if it might be appropriate. Then you try it, secure in the knowledge that if you are doing something dangerous the program will a) warn you, and b) give you an Undo command or c) work on a copy of the original data so you don't lose anything. With a CL interface you issue commands by typing, and typing long complicated words is a drag, so the common commands are very terse. Because they're terse they are necessarily cryptic. If I didn't know how to rename a file in Unix, how would I ever guess that the command is mv? I might guess that that means "move" (which it does), but not that re-naming the file is a side effect. If I want to perform the same operation in Windows or Mac OS I just click on the file name to highlight it and type the new name. Of course, mv will allow me to do more complicated things like moving/renaming a whole bunch of files at once, but that's a sufficiently uncommon operation that I'd have to go and read the blasted man page to remind myself of how to do it:-) >If anyone comes up with a good solution to this problem, it >will be a major advance in documentation. My wife, who used to be computer-phobic, recently got a copy of Photoshop 7. This is a professional image editing system of enormous power and complexity. She hasn't asked me how to use it, and the manuals are still in their clingwrap. Nevertheless, she's showing me pictures where she's changed the colour balance, added captions, removed objects that spoil the composition etc. How long would it have taken her to achieve the same results if it had been a CL driven program? Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
