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command line interface (CLI)

Posted: Sat Oct 25, 2008 6:25 am
by i586coder
Best of your knowledge, what is the best CLI user friendly

-UNIX
-DOS
-others


I developed CLI for my UNEXT/os,it's look like mix of UNIX & DOS
but most people don't know any thing about UNIX :?

this is sample for my CLI

Code: Select all

 UNEXT/os v7.1 (c)2008 by Ahmad T. Dajani

 root/floppya/> dir *.com | more
what you think :?:

Cheers,
Ahmad T. Dajani

Re: command line interface (CLI)

Posted: Sat Oct 25, 2008 6:39 am
by Brendan
Hi,
AhmadTayseerDajani wrote:Best of your knowledge, what is the best CLI user friendly
To the best of my knowledge, the most user friendly CLI is also the least powerful CLI, because extra features that make a CLI more powerful also make the CLI more complex and more confusing.

If people want something user friendly, then they'll use a GUI. If people want something powerful, then a powerful CLI (e.g. something that's more like an interactive interpreted language) can be a very good choice. A user friendly CLI is useless (unless there is no GUI, but in that case anything is better than nothing).


Cheers,

Brendan

Re: command line interface (CLI)

Posted: Sat Oct 25, 2008 6:56 am
by i586coder
Brendan wrote: If people want something user friendly, then they'll use a GUI
you right, but CLI still need's for any OS to work with low level
operations like device errors etc. that crash GUI

for example:
my kernel use default values in root/system/mouse.ini
to setup mouse, the default mouse driver is ms-serial,suppose you are
using ps/2,in this case GUI will work but mouse will not present,so
you need to exit GUI and back to CLI to change mouse valuse #-o

ThankX

Re: command line interface (CLI)

Posted: Sat Oct 25, 2008 9:22 am
by Combuster
IMO command line interfaces are *never* user-friendly. They are just more or less powerful.

Re: command line interface (CLI)

Posted: Sat Oct 25, 2008 2:51 pm
by Walling
I think user-friendliness is determined by the ones using the software. I would expect mostly power users to be using a CLI and they might like to do a lot of things in a few commands. But you can help new users a lot. I think Python is nice because it has a lot of inline help functions and runtime documentation. It is a programming language, yes, but who said that a CLI shouldn't offer that? And bash wouldn't be the same without man pages. Another thing is auto-completion. If it can be done right I think it can be very powerful. Maybe the CLI can collect usage statistics and knows that a pipe after "dir" usually goes to "more" and not "grep", so it can suggest that. Again it requires some research for you to really understand how your users (would) use the software and what can be optimized. The command names in itself is a minor detail of user-friendliness IMHO. It can be learned. But maybe you should add a way to make command aliases, so the users are able to rename the commands. I think power users like to be able to configure things. That said, the default configuration should be somewhat sensible to new users.