Articles Tagged with "Command-line"

02/08/2007: Command Line Interfaces, Again

I posted a couple of years ago that the command line is the interface of the future. Today I stumbled on a couple of articles that seem to agree with me:

Quicksilver blows away both Apple’s Dock and Microsoft Windows’ Taskbar in terms of speed and usability. And what is it? A command-line interface with a bit of eye-candy.

Command-line really is the way to go.

18/06/2007: dict, thes & ency

dict is a command that is supplied with most Linux and BSD distributions. If you enter dict foo at the command-line, you get back the dictionary definition of “foo”. Normally several different dictionaries are supplied, including some dictionaries of translation, and it’s possible to look up the word on various online dictionaries too.

As counterparts to dict I’ve created thes for looking stuff up in Moby’s Thesaurus and ency for online encyclopaedia Wikipedia…

14/06/2007: HenPlus

For a while, I’ve been using a great little Java-based GUI SQL client called dbVisualizer. It’s a nifty little database management tool that — here’s the good part — supports virtually every database backend under the sun. I use it to manage PostgreSQL and MySQL databases at home and PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL Server at work, and I can flit between them, using a consistent interface for them all. It’s great.

However, being a GUI app, it’s a bit slow for when I just want to make one or two small queries, so I went looking for a speedy command-line equivalent today and found HenPlus. Like dbVis, HenPlus is based on Java and JDBC, so it’s able to work with a staggering array of backends. It’s command-line based, so it should work double-fast, even over a SSH connection.

The one problem I had installing it was with libreadline-java, which is a…

08/06/2005: The User Interface of the Future

GreyWyvern wrote:

Soon (real soon now) we’ll be progressing to voice-controlled systems. “Copy Document to desktop”, “Empty trash”, “Open Slashdot”.

This is precisely an argument for the command-line paradigm! What you are describing is a command-line, with the keyboard simply being replaced with a microphone…