It all boils down to a remembered interface versus a ``hunting'' interface. The remembered interface relies on the user knowing basically what they want, and provides quick ways to give them that (command recall, command/filename completions, wildcards, chainable tools (pipes) etc). The GUI presumes that the user needs to see a range of obvious choices to find out what they want, and provides easily navigable ways of presenting this (windows, icons, menus, pulldowns, spinners, sliders and other widgets).
You can see the interfaces wanting to borrow from each other as GUIs sprout shortcut keys and command-line tools do stuff like colourise filenames. You can also see interface designers failing to carry the metaphor, such as when a file selection dialog box opens on a directory with thousands of filenames and no simple way of logically simplifying the choices, or a command-line provides no way of discovering commands or recalling/editing command lines. So when someone says ``terminals are best'' or ``GUIs are best,'' an appropriate response is ``for some things,'' or ``for what?'' When someone proposes to axe commands or axe the GUI, you can ask things like ``so how do I select the 3000 files with gutterals in their names from this 80,000 file directory, and list all of their `name' fields?'' or ``gee, my JPEGs aren't going to look too wonderful after chugging through AAlib,'' or ``who are you, Bill Gates?'' - but whatever you do, don't take them seriously. Cheers; Leon
