On Sun, 7 Nov 2010 13:51:22 -0700 Chad Perrin <per...@apotheon.com> wrote:
> I choose a little up-front learning curve for massive efficiency and > productivity enhancements down the road. The increased efficiency of > a minimal, composable toolset driven by the keyboard can be a huge > win in long-term productivity for one motivated to learn how to use > it, as well as a major savings on system resources (and hardware > costs, since upgrades do not need to happen as often, nor be as > cutting-edge). > > Others choose some inefficiency in the long run to avoid having to > learn anything new up front. The increased discoverability, at least > for simple tasks, of a point-and-click interface tends to seem more > "intuitive" and familiar to people just coming to a new system for the > first time, makes task completion easier to figure out the first time > (and the thirtieth, since point-and-click interfaces tend to require > figuring out the same tasks over and over again). With the command-line you also choose the inefficiency of having to read the man page every time you want to do something you're not familiar with. Well-designed UIs allow you to easily discover how to do it without resorting to the Help file - and since people tend to have good visual memories they can remember it better than a string of characters. A good example of this is Subversion tagging/branching: in Windows I can use the menu option "TortoiseSVN -> branch/tag..." to create a branch and have it done in a minute. Using the command-line I'd have to spend time reading up on the commandline parameters to achieve the same thing, since it's something I only do about once a year or so. -- Bruce Cran _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
