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Ask HN: do you know of any commandline usability / improvement research?
29 points by viraptor on May 23, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 10 comments
I'm looking for some serious articles about commandline / console / text-interface usability issues / ideas. It doesn't really matter if the ideas were implemented anywhere or not. I couldn't find anything that's not gui-related so far on google-schoolar and others. Just to be clear - I'm after proper papers, not "10 tips for better bash".

Do you know of anything related and not trivial?



If you look at the links on this wikipedia page you should find useful information. Aza Raskin has been working with command line interfaces and has done some interesting things with them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aza_Raskin


Thanks - that's a great starting point. I haven't heard about Archy before, but it also seems contains a lot of nice text-related ideas. Definitely interesting stuff.


Microsoft apparently has done a number of studies on Powershell usability, but I don't think they've published the results:

http://www.google.com/search?q=powershell+usability+study


Friendly shell has gotten some attention over the past few seasons.

http://fishshell.org/index.php

http://fishshell.org/user_doc/design.html


I don't know any to precisely point to. But one area where commandline usability is of key interest is in mobile phone services operating on USSD.

I used to consult for a startup in India where number of users on USSD outnumber WAP. We used to constantly make a lot of tuning on the screens of the application and the workflow analysing the usage. I however don't have any papers or scholarly material to point.


I dont know about research, but the command autojump has changed the way I use the command line significantly and made my life much easier. Check it out on github


CLIM has input editing and output recording. Look at the McCLIM shell which freely mixes repl-type input with graphic output.


You may want to look at Inky -- it's not traditional console/text, but rather taking some of that feel into a "command-line for the web with rich visual feedback:

Inky: A Sloppy Command Line for the Web

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1llZnsye0M


You may find these interesting:

http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Command_002dLine...

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/topics/winpsh/...

This looks very good, but too lazy to sign up:

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=800045.801577

Some user testing for Ubiquity seems relevant:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/Usability/Usability_T...


ehm, quicksilver?




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