Command line is useful when you know what you are doing. There is nothing wrong in having a command line too.
@Ayelis:
I donāt know about hooking it up to Google butā¦
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guake
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilda_(software)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakuake
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuake
Cheers 
I always use 100JPY in USD;
Recently JPY has appreciated and I am having a ballā¦
Command lines let you express intent with a level of efficiency that a GUI never will. Thatās why software is still created using text and not graphical symbols manipulated by a GUI. The problem is that people never want to take the time to learn how to use the command line effectively, a GUI is way more discoverable. This is why we have a generation of software engineers reliant on bloated IDEs instead of being proficient at emacs/vim.
All you programming pundits incessantly bang on about how nobody reads books anymore or learns their editor or explores hardware architecture and CPU instruction latency but you have no problem denigrating command lines as obscure UNIX. Why donāt you do an experiment and actually learn a command line shell and see if your productivity improves. Being a MS fan Iād suggest you start with PowerShell.
You know, I find it ironic that the title of this post is almost the same as that fireball: http://daringfireball.net/2004/06/location_field (which on top of that is in the goddamn The Best Software Writing I which you even talked about at http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000346.html !). With that, and Stack Overflow using Markdown, you might wish to rething what you said in a comment of http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000796.html : For example, if John daringfireball Gruber spent a fraction of the time he spends obsessively responding to every public criticism of the Mac on, yāknow, creating something cool (and writing about it, obviously), heād influence a lot more people. (oh, and by the way, itās a shame that comments in your blog donāt have individual anchors; especially when you rave how comments are the best part of your blog)
Very good examples, shows what search engines are capable of.
Good man Jeff coming from the Amiga background. All the best people did
@Matt Green
If Jeff manages to offend someone by poorly identifying something as command line then I donāt really think Jeff is the one with the problem.
It seems a lot of people almost entirely (willfully?) missed the point of this post.
Using the command line as the primary interface for an average computer user ended many years ago.
Weāre now seeing web browsers which implement functions to find and manipulate information through text based commands. A Command Line Interface.
The title is naturally hyperbolic, but the essential message is true. The command line ādiedā, but is now returning in the web browser address bar. It is the new command line.
Come talk to me when I can start stringing these commands together to form larger commands.
yeah, but without:
- tab-complete
- man pages
- pipes
recreating the wheel in your browser doesnāt make it better it just makes it dependent on your browser.
If only you knew the power of the command lineā¦
MikeS wrote: Jeff, itās funny that Google has already indexed this article, so that Googling ālink:experts-exchange.com sucksā brings up this very page.
Even funnier, since this page does not link to experts-exchange.com. Jeffās point is blunted by the fact that Google has quietly been turning off most of the features listed on http://www.google.com/help/cheatsheet.html in the past year or two. The keyword link: no longer works. Nor does lang:.
And I have no idea what Jeff thought presidents 1850ā¦1860 would do. It doesnāt do anything interesting for me (searching from within the continental U.S.).
Jeff,
This page is now the 8th page listed when you search for link:experts-exchange.com sucks
(sorry, somehow it posted prematurely)
waitā¦ new?.. iāve been using this ever since IE 6ā¦
later on browsers like IE 7 and FF added a separate search bar, which iāve never quite understood, since the IE 6 way has always worked just great (and still does).
this is incredibly old, but has been forgotten because of FF zealots; good to see Chrome brings it back, i guess.
Personally, I donāt use a web browser; I write a script from a command line whenever I want to access the web. Takes a while, especially with typos, but so what?
Opera is one browser that is seriously misunderestimated 
Jeff,
With all due respect, youāre abusing the term command line. It isnāt a real command line unless it is rife with poorly-named, cryptic commands like grep and sed, or if it trips over spaces easily (well, the address bar does do that), or if it has 5 different ways to pass arguments to commands. URLs are often much too readable, too. Although, with the advent of URL-shortening, weāre finally on r wy 2 abbrvtng evrthg ndlsly.
Just saying. You might offend someone using words like that.
Felt more like posting some rambling thoughts on the topic than working apprently; here you go:
I believe that the overwhelming majority of computer operators out there could have their machines replaced with internet enabled terminals and be none the wiser. The typical operator doesnāt know/care squat about the OS or the browser, any opinions that they may hold are most likely ungrounded in any real understanding. They want the internet to do what they want with the least amount of hassle, and who can blame them. Who climbs the tree when thereās low hanging fruit?
Iāve known about address bar search functionality for some time but being a āpuristā (arrogant, stubborn, late-adopter) Iāve resisted the address bar search until recently, when Iāve finally admitted to myself that Iām just eliminating an unecessary step when looking for something.
Itās got the potential for changing the way we operate in some not too obvious ways; personally Iāve noticed that Iām no longer taking time to book mark sites that I know will come up top ranked from address line searches. Iām lazier, why bother typing in the whole ā.comā part of the address when I can just type āchessā or āstack overflowā; just enter WHAT I want not WHERE I want and it getās me back to click navigation all the sooner.
Does point to a fundamental division between the operator and the programmer; as a programmer I look for any way to avoid the mouse, give me hot keys, arrow and tab navigation (swear that when youāre holding down ctl+alt+shift if you pick up your hand youād be throwing gang signs), anything to avoid having to make that quarter second input device transition ā you canāt program with a mouse (unless youāre one of THOSE giu/ide types that program without using a keyboard, in which case I despise everything you stand for and I do not accept your ābut itās RAD!ā excuse.)
Anyone remember the era before the age of the cell phone? How many phone numbers would you have committed to memory, 20, 30, more? Now with your personal phone book in your pocket constantly how many phone numbers have you committed to memory? I would venture to guess that you overall may have more end-points available to you at any given time but that you donāt know as many of the addresses as you used to.
The technology is inspired by and delivers convenience, but itās a catch-22. When you dumb down the interface you make it more accessible but you also remove the incentive to learn how to operate the machine or understand how the machine operated; paving the way for the need to further dumb down the UI.
So whereās the happy medium between getting me the info I want/need via the shortest/fastest possible route every time and making me so stupid and lazy that I reject learning with hostillity?
Anyone else out there use āabout:blankā as their homepage?
moving onā¦