Timeline for Why are terminal consoles still used?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
20 events
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| Jun 16, 2020 at 10:51 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
Commonmark migration
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| Dec 6, 2016 at 0:11 | comment | added | Wildcard | This sounds like Master Foo Discourses on the Graphical User Interface from the UNIX koans. :D | |
| Dec 4, 2016 at 23:53 | comment | added | Ángel | @immibis they even had to add the «Press here to start» message when there was no activity after X minutes, because some people would simply stay waiting as if the desktop was part of the booting process, too. | |
| Dec 3, 2016 at 18:25 | comment | added | joojaa | @jamesqf RTFMing is a dimension of discoverability. However, discoverability is more than that. Its being able to deduce what you would do to achieve something. CLI's are often discoverable as they have inbuilt man and other introspection tools. Many GUI's lack such systems. | |
| Dec 3, 2016 at 18:05 | comment | added | jamesqf | @Michael Kjörling: Why should the interface to a non-trivial application/system be 'discoverable' rather than 'RTFMable"? Take for instance LaTeX vs MS Word/OO: I suppose if I used trial & error in the later long enough, I could figure out how to produce a decent paper with equations, graphs, pseudocode &c. (Though 'long enough' might exceed my life expectancy :-)) With LaTeX, I can easily look up whatever I need in a index, because it's language, not grunting & pointing. | |
| Dec 3, 2016 at 5:22 | comment | added | user | @joojaa Exactly. There is a lot of focus on UIs being "user friendly" but lots of UI designers today seem to forget about discoverability. When there is no indication on the screen that doing Thing X will lead to Result Y, then doing Thing X to obtain Result Y is non-discoverable. Non-discoverable UI elements can be a great way to provide power user functionality (like pressing Alt+D to focus the address bar in a web browser which, IIRC, actually was originally discoverable), but it's not a good way to design elements of a UI that ordinary users can be expected to want to use. | |
| Dec 3, 2016 at 5:19 | comment | added | user | @immibis They also had three buttons instead of one in early attempts, but apparently found that users were being confused so they scaled it back to a single button. Compare the November 1993 "build 73" pre-beta with beta 1 of what became Windows 95. | |
| Dec 2, 2016 at 21:15 | comment | added | joojaa | @MichaelKjörling Bad design is bad design even as a GUI. Personally i think the worst UX is the constant need to fiddle with the way stuff that we use all day long, and dont want to focus on, so we need to relearn stuff all the time for no good reason. | |
| Dec 2, 2016 at 21:11 | comment | added | Criticizing Israel not allowed | @MichaelKjorling Fun fact: in Windows 95 the "Start" button used to just have a Windows logo (like it does in Vista and 7) but they added the word "Start" so people would know to click on it. Funny how times have changed and now we have that problem again. | |
| Dec 2, 2016 at 16:23 | comment | added | user | I would argue that some recent GUIs are decidedly non-discoverable. Take the Windows 8 "Start" screen, for example: when I open it, there is NO indication that typing will do anything, nor is there any obvious way to access a list of installed programs. "Three dots" or "three bars" is not obvious as "click here for more options". And so on. Sure, all of those are easy once you know them, but that doesn't make them obvious or even discoverable. | |
| Dec 2, 2016 at 13:55 | comment | added | joojaa | @ceving does it suggest that? I think it suggests: sure pointing is easier but ultimately that in itself does not mean its better. | |
| Dec 2, 2016 at 12:37 | comment | added | ceving | It would have been better to elaborate the simile more instead of suggesting that a CLI is not more complicated than a GUI. A GUI has no right to exist, if it does not simplify anything. And therefor a CLI is of course more complicated than a GUI. But that is just the price one has to pay to be able to express much more and to get all the other benefits of a CLI. | |
| Dec 2, 2016 at 12:18 | comment | added | ceving | The speaking child is a great simile! | |
| S Dec 1, 2016 at 20:24 | history | suggested | oals | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Dec 1, 2016 at 20:10 | review | Suggested edits | |||
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| Dec 1, 2016 at 11:30 | history | edited | joojaa | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Dec 1, 2016 at 10:55 | history | edited | joojaa | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Dec 1, 2016 at 9:09 | history | edited | joojaa | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Dec 1, 2016 at 6:46 | history | edited | joojaa | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Dec 1, 2016 at 6:25 | history | answered | joojaa | CC BY-SA 3.0 |