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I think the world missed an opportunity around about the '90s. Instead of evolving, command lines stagnated and got sidelined by terrible GUIs that are only no

I think the world missed an opportunity around about the '90s. Instead of evolving, command lines stagnated and got sidelined by terrible GUIs that are only now evolving to get out of people's way. We should have developed command lines with graphics and hypertext. Thus you could do `ls` and double-click on one of the resulting files to open it. Browse the web with wget. Of course users don't want to learn lots of commands. But notice how Windows 7 onwards and most linux desktops have a "fuzzy search" that really is a kind of command line.

vidarh 10y ago
There has been many attempts, but they've universally not gotten things "right enough" to gain much traction. E.g. Mozilla's XMLTerm [1] was one such experiment. [1] http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/06/07/xmlterm/index.html http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/06/07/xmlterm/index.html
digi_owl 10y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy Anyways, if i am to speculate then GUI took over because of discoverability and ease of translation. A CLI is damn hard to translate. With a GUI you change the labels, and thats it. And finding something in a menu or similar was, before programs grew into massive behemoths, simpler than trying to guess what command, for most outside the english speaking world, named in a foreign language, to give to get something done.