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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • If a user speaks a different language, good usability knowledge will tell you, change the software to help the user. Not change the user to help the software. The software is only there to make things easier for people.

    As I said for many people, the tasks they do are not always possible or not easy with the CLI. Try drawing a curve, try moving an object from bottom left to a position higher up to the right. Even navigating a tree structure, common in many apps, it’s easy to click on a chosen branch directly. Even with CLI options, more people, including CLI users, feel it’s natural to use a GUI app to do their email, manage files or browse the web. There is a lot of learnability built in. Discovering new things by accident is a natural benefit. And a big downside of the CLI. Which is not THE natural way at all.




  • Sure there are some people who can’t do anything. But there are a large number of full time computer users not in IT who know their GUIs really well. These are candidates to switch to Linux.

    If you give someone a text string to paste in, chances are they won’t be able to tell if it worked. They might need another command for that. And how can they undo that command? And the next time they need that command they’ll have to have stored that command string somewhere! Which is why it is better to show them the option in their application GUI, as the GUI will provide feedback on the status. And makes it obvious how to undo the change, and they know where to go next time. Otherwise they are dependent on you forever. Also, I doubt if there are any text commands for most things I do on a computer.

    You don’t design a UI around the relatively few occasions when GUI help is too hard for some helper.