Ananya Vetaal > I was wondering what could be the > possible circumstances where a > command line interface would > be more suitable or better than a GUI.
Anecdote: my husband retired last year from his job as a UNIX sysadmin. He loathed all GUIs, and not just because he'd learned VI (which he calls 'vomit inducer' so you can see he's one for a turn of phrase). So a typical update on a typical machine with a typical GUI might be six clicks, one typed entry, and three button clicks. No problem. Only, he's got to do it across anything up to a couple of hundred machines. Hands up anyone who wants to click through a GUI six hundred times doing the same thing in 100 places. Not to mention keep track of which of the 100 places has been done or not - while also dealing with customer support issues, hardware breakdowns, bosses who love to interrupt to reset the priorities given a whole 10 minutes ago, etc. What he wanted was a command line interface that let him write some scripts, e.g. in a Korn shell, to automate all that and track it. No CLI, no scripts, he's one grumpy bunny. Substantive point: You'll find that many programs resort to CLIs, or line-by-line models, when the going gets tough. Think about when you want to edit HTML directly and when you want to do it WYSIWYG. Hope this helps Caroline Jarrett www.formsthatwork.com ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
