
The future of UI is text - charlieirish
http://partyline.rocks/blog/futureofui/
======
wmeredith
No way. I've been designing and coding interfaces for 10 years, and time after
time one of the biggest constraints for what is on/off the screen is the
user's memory.

Want to know why the command line is hard for plebs? It's because they don't
know what the options are. They don't even know what they don't know.

The whole point of a GUI is to convey the possibilities. Show users a menu and
they get to pick something. This isn't going to change anytime soon. At least
not until terminal commands are taught in school alongside the alphabet and
multiplication tables.

~~~
miguelrochefort
This simply is an artifact of the original design of CLI. You start by writing
the command or function, and then you provide parameters or arguments. The
order in which these things are provided leads to poor discoverability.

Instead of starting with the command, we should start with an argument. Given
a "thing" (that likely exists in your UI), such as a file, a song, a person, a
chunk of text, show me the list of commands that accept it as a parameter.
You'll quickly discover that a chunk of text can be passed to functions such
as "tweet", "copy to clipboard", "create memo", "search on Google",
"translate". Congratulations, you just invented the contextual menu, which
people have been using for decades.

"Things" are easy to discover; you can see them. Commands that interact with
them, are not as easy to discover; you can't see them. Let people touch or
name things (with or without a query language), and once they grabbed the
instance they care about, show them what can be done with it. It's that
simple.

Before:

> /tweet "some random thoughts" // where you had to know 'tweet' existed as a
> command

After:

> "some random thoughts" -> tweet // where 'tweet' was auto-suggested, along
> with 'search', 'translate', 'copy', etc.

~~~
seagreen
This is brilliant. Do you have suggestions for where I can go to read more
about this idea?

~~~
mitchtbaum
This question seems to point in this direction of changing our shell syntax
from `vo` to `ov`, based on Jef Raskin's Humane Interface
[http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/48051/how-to-extend-
th...](http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/48051/how-to-extend-the-noun-
verb-paradigm-to-multiple-nouns) .. I imagine pluggable shell grammars would
allow open ended exploration this way.

~~~
agumonkey
I see this strongly related to many combinators in FP too.

(system command arguments)

flip -> (system arguments command) curry -> (system arguments) command

# and for the humane touch:

thread (system (completing-read)) (completing-read)

etc etc

Oh, and BTW, GUIs didn't buy ergonomy, sometimes you need to open an
application then the data (aka /tweet "bla"), early systems had a simple 1:1
map 'type' 'program' with an 'open-with' intermediate. Then they added 1:N ...
One day it will be a tiny Hindley-Milner unifier ;)

------
miguelrochefort
This is an ad for Partyline. The thesis, sadly, is poorly demonstrated.

This should have been called "The present of UI input is text for this
particular use case".

Text (or speech) as an input method is alright when you know exactly what you
want. However, this is not a very good exploration interface, where you need
to interact with things that are presented in a 2D/3D space. Text also isn't
very expressive when it comes to consuming content.

The future of UI, in most cases, is no UI. Let some AI study and understand
you, and let it make decisions on your behalf.

~~~
ygra
Wolfram Alpha suffers a bit from that, I think: You can query a great lot of
things but for many of them it requires you to a) know about that you can
query that, b) knowing _how_ to query for that, c) how to give options,
parameters. The natural language interface sounds great and makes for awesome
demos (like »Wow, they can actually understand that?«), but it's horrible for
discoverability, especially in cases where you can try five different ways of
saying the same thing but only the sixth would actually yield a result.

~~~
miguelrochefort
The shortcomings of natural language interfaces are obvious, and I cannot
understand why so many people believe it to be the future.

Humanity needs a formal language, which requires formal thinking. Ambiguity is
not a problem when a language is used to browse, explore and clarify thoughts,
but this kind of interaction needs to be feedback-driven.

You can't just input an ambiguous natural language query and expects accurate
results. However, you can start with an ambiguous natural language query, and
quickly make it into a formal one thanks to smart auto-completion. Only when
the query reach a formal threshold should it be executed.

~~~
juliendorra
Formalization could be done in interaction with the computer. For a basic
example today, we can look at how Google correct your query and suggest other
queries, or any other form of auto-complete and auto-correct

------
meshko
1) argue that non-power uses will love the text-based interfaces 2) support
your claim with a bunch of examples from software development workflows.

Sigh.

~~~
moistgorilla
It's not exclusive to slack, for example: twitch chat there are a bunch of
text commands that people love to use. When people use emojis and other such
things they usually use a text macro. If you've noticed with programs like
photoshop and illustrator, it's recommended for novices to learn all of the
keyboard shortcuts.

If anything this points to the future of UI being a combination of text and
point and click.

~~~
onion2k
_It 's not exclusive to slack, for example: twitch chat there are a bunch of
text commands that people love to use._

People who use Twitch a lot love to use them. People who don't use Twitch much
don't bother. This backs up the argument that power users like macros.

 _When people use emojis and other such things they usually use a text macro._

True, but that might be because PC keyboards don't have emoji. There's no
other option. People certainly don't use a macro on mobile; they use a an
emoji keyboard because that's what they prefer.

 _If you 've noticed with programs like photoshop and illustrator, it's
recommended for novices to learn all of the keyboard shortcuts._

There's an assumption when you're learning something with the end goal of
understanding that application that you're on the first steps to becoming an
expert (aka power user). If someone is only learning how to achieve a single
end result they don't start with the shortcuts. For example, someone who just
wants to learn how to resize and crop images in Photoshop just learns the two
or three features they're going to use and then they stop.

I don't know very many people outside of the software industry who are happy
with a command line interface, and even fewer who're happy with macros on a
command line.

Also, if Partyline is the future, then I don't like it. The two examples in
the article are inconsistent;

 _/ partyline create Signup endpoint is 500'ing label:bug_

vs

 _/ partyline create:task Write about the future of text-based interfaces_

Why is the first one using a "create" verb with a "bug" label and the second
using a "create:task" verb? Why not "create:bug" in the first one, or
"label:task" in the second?

~~~
hutattedonmyarm
_True, but that might be because PC keyboards don 't have emoji. There's no
other option. People certainly don't use a macro on mobile; they use a an
emoji keyboard because that's what they prefer._

I actually set up the few emoji I use as macros, so I don't have to switch
keyboards. Then again, I fall into the power-user category

------
boundring
Come on, nobody's used CAD programs with integrated GUI and command line both
equally accessible?

It's super intuitive, entirely customizable, and every button press results in
a listable text record of each command with combined access to either windowed
variables (spline radii, inputting coordinates for start and finish points,
entering macros on the fly, routines, accessing algorithms)

This has all been old news for decades.

Now, adapting Autodesk's approach for other fields?

Can't be impossible. Still, engineers in many fields have enjoyed such
flexibility as a matter of course. Take a page from their experiences.

~~~
elcritch
You make a good point. I haven't used autocad before but after trying other
cad programs and being frustrated with the lack of cli control it makes sense.
What you explain sounds awesome!

Unfortunately, the current paradigm of tools for gui's (and even cli's) remain
incredibly static and inflexible in their approach and design. It's not a
problem that we don't know how to do it, as the autoccad example shows, but
rather developers and companies lack the gumption to figure out how to make
portable libraries and platforms based on it.

By this I mean, that the autocad program would have to have some kind of
dynamic data and code system with rules and an internal grammar for composing
them. It reminds me of the old joke "every program evolves until it
reimplement common lisp -- poorly". This can be done in C++ and java, etc, but
you end up basically building your own dynamic lisp like system. This often
gets encapsulated in design patterns built into complex class hierarchies.

Basically, my take is that while it's possible to build on autodesk's and
others examples, most efforts are either too academic and esoteric or just
poorly executed. I think the culture in development is getting to a point this
approach could be widely adopted.

~~~
userbinator
Funny you mention Lisp, because that's exactly what AutoCAD has:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoLISP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoLISP)

~~~
elcritch
Bam! And that strengthens my argument. I didn't realize they actually _had_ a
lisp embedded.

~~~
lispm
Not 'had', 'have'.

------
xiaq
The Anti-Mac Interface ([http://www.nngroup.com/articles/anti-mac-
interface/](http://www.nngroup.com/articles/anti-mac-interface/)) argues for
the advantage of text over GUI in a more vivid way:

> The see-and-point principle states that users interact with the computer by
> pointing at the objects they can see on the screen. It's as if we have
> thrown away a million years of evolution, lost our facility with expressive
> language, and been reduced to pointing at objects in the immediate
> environment. Mouse buttons and modifier keys give us a vocabulary equivalent
> to a few different grunts. We have lost all the power of language, and can
> no longer talk about objects that are not immediately visible (all files
> more than one week old), objects that don't exist yet (future messages from
> my boss), or unknown objects (any guides to restaurants in Boston).

------
tim333
Mildly off topic but re

>In the past, we thought the future of computing would look complicated: lots
of buttons, multiple screens, and crazy interfaces.

... followed by a shot of the 1960's Star Trek ship's deck, then saying we're
headed for command lines instead. Since 50 years have passed since that set
was designed I thought I'd google how designs have changed. Here's the space
shuttle

[http://cdn.visualnews.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/03/Discove...](http://cdn.visualnews.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/03/Discovery_Flight_Deck_5.jpg)

and here's a modern ship

[http://www.motorship.com/__data/assets/image/0020/705404/THE...](http://www.motorship.com/__data/assets/image/0020/705404/THE-
VIEW-FROM-THE-BRIDGE.jpg)

Still looks more like lots of buttons, multiple screens, and crazy interfaces
than command line to me. Still give it another half century.

------
userbinator
How do you reconcile this with the declining popularity of desktop and laptop
computers, and the increase of smartphones, tablets, and other keyboardless
touchscreen devices? I haven't noticed an increase in keyboarding skills
either, which are absolutely essential to use a CLI well.

I _wish_ CLIs would become more popular amongst the general population, but it
seems GUIs (which are also becoming "flatter" and less discoverable,
ironically enough) have taken over completely for almost everyone.

~~~
stagas
Voice recognition? So you might say, the future of UI is saying what you want
to happen, either by typing it or speaking it outloud.

~~~
nommm-nommm
How many people actually prefer the "tell me why you called?" phone menus over
"press 1 for billing" phone menus?

------
dahart
Slack is not a text interface. Slack _has_ as text interface for many common
operations, but you can't ignore how much GUI Slack has.

The future of UI is having graphical and text interfaces at the same time.
Throw in touch, speech and sight for fun if you want. None of it is going
away. Most programs need a simple and very well thought out GUI, aimed both at
new users and at discoverability of features for experienced users, and more
powerful text based interfaces and keyboard shortcuts for power users. This is
what the best programs do now, and what Slack does too.

The interesting thing about having both/multiple kinds of UI is that it guides
the overall design structure of a program. Having both GUI and text interfaces
forces MVC patterns to emerge, and it requires having a strong underlying
foundation for your data and the operations that manipulate it.

*edited for typos

------
DiabloD3
As someone who lives in one or more terminals during the day, in my opinion,
"the future of UI is text" is misleading: it is the past, present AND future.

------
striking
Text is good, but not for everything. How would you represent a tree or graph
data structure in text to a human and let them manipulate it?

I understand that this works for some things. A command-line interface is good
for giving commands! Yet using it to paint is a lot harder.

Essentially, text interfaces are good at manipulating text. As a software
developer you're often manipulating _only_ text. So you think text interfaces
are good, always. This is a syllogistic fallacy.

~~~
wtbob
> How would you represent a tree or graph data structure in text to a human
> and let them manipulate it?

Tree:

    
    
        '(root (left (left-left left-right)) (right (right-left right-right)))
    

Graph:

    
    
        '(graph (#1=node1 #2=node2) (#2# #3=node3) (#3# #1#))
    

Solved problems since at least the early 90s.

> Yet using it to paint is a lot harder.

Sure, but drawing is only one activity among many possible activities.

> As a software developer you're often manipulating only text.

I think that's true for most users: they are reading articles (text); writing
comments (text); sending social updates (rich text); watching videos ( _not_
text); playing games ( _not_ text, but may have textual content, e.g. in-game
chat).

~~~
swhipple
I'm not really convinced S-exprs are particularly good examples of
representing trees and graphs to humans while expecting them to be as easily
readable and writable as the graphical forms.

You lose spatial intuition with this representation. You could make up for it
on small trees somewhat with indentation and vertical spacing, but you'd lose
it again for larger trees and graphs. We don't pictorially represent our trees
like this [1], for instance, which is roughly how the S-exprs visually appear.

When I author graphs in LaTeX, it is often easier to run through a compilation
cycle to see what the result looks like and which edits are needed, rather
than mentally reasoning about the edges by looking at the code.

[1] [http://i.imgur.com/43Dc8YB.png](http://i.imgur.com/43Dc8YB.png)

------
osetinsky
I ask myself this question as it pertains to the future of music. Digital
Audio Workstations such as Ableton Live and Logic Pro dominate the scene when
it comes to making music with a computer (at least in pop music), and
companies such as Splice are trying to create collaborative networks around
them.

Text based interfaces and audio programming languages such as SuperCollider
open up a whole new world of musical creativity, and would lend themselves to
collaboration (IMO) better than GUI based ones. The obvious hurdle for people
is learning how to create things/music/art with text.

[https://supercollider.github.io/](https://supercollider.github.io/)
[http://sccode.org/](http://sccode.org/) music written with supercollider:
[https://open.spotify.com/track/4VecDB1uhp44posWgt85yN](https://open.spotify.com/track/4VecDB1uhp44posWgt85yN)

------
andreasley
What most people don't realize is that GUI and command line aren't mutually
exclusive. There's nothing preventing developers from creating apps that have
a beautiful and informative GUI while providing a way to use text-based,
specific commands. Use the best from both worlds.

It would be great if there was a system-wide, standardized way to do this in
every app, but until an OS with this ability exists, we'll just have to do it
ourselves.

~~~
omaranto
Well, people joke about Emacs being an OS. If you take them seriously, I think
it's an example of an OS where you can run graphical applications but have a
standardized way to run text-based commands from any app (using execute-
extended-command, bound by default to Meta-x).

It's not really practical to use Emacs as your only OS right now, but it
certainly has many of the applications I need day to day: a text editor
(obviously), a web-browser (that can display images, but currently does not
run JavaScript), a PDF viewer, email clients, feed readers, command shells,
several videogames, etc.

------
bithush
When I first used Cortana as part of Windows 10 I was quite disappointed when
I found out it lacked quick commands like this. Sure it has _some_
understanding of what is written such as "remind me to call Jim at 2pm" but it
is very limited.

I was hoping I would be able to things like the following -

    
    
      * backup Fizz Buzz project (and have it intelligently backup the Fizz Buss Visual Studio project to a default location)
    
      * open Fizz Buzz issue 131 (and have it open a browser to the github issue tracker to the correct issue #)
    
      * email the Fizz Buzz project plan to Jim (you can *kind of* do this but it hardly ever works as you would want)
    
      * open Fizz Buzz todo.txt when I next login
    
      * copy the Fizz Buzz project plan to my Dropbox projects folder
    

You know things that I will otherwise need to open the command prompt for or
do some mundane UI task. Sure some of these things will require applications
have such support but from what I can tell Cortana offers no real way to do
this other than integrating with the Windows search service.

Considering most (all?) of these things could be done with PowerShell cmdlets
it is annoying there is no way to script Cortana via PowerShell in such a way.

Maybe one day.

~~~
shortstuffsushi
A lot of those things seem like commands specific to your environment though
(read: things someone would have to develop out). Does Cortana offer some sort
of API allowing you to add additional "commands" that she understands? That
would be pretty neat.

~~~
bithush
I checked a few months ago but there was nothing specifically for desktop apps
only universal ones and even then they were mostly voice-oriented things so
you can "plug in to Bing". Ugh.

As far as I can tell it is not [yet?] possible to integrate features from a
classic Win32 application into Cortana to do things like I listed. Shame as
_that_ would have been very cool.

My examples are very specific to my domain for sure but they were just some
examples for my use, the general concept of using Cortana as an actual digital
assistant to automate/speedup boring and often done tasks.

------
hberg
Sorry, I don't buy the premise.

The future of UI (for the general public) is probably voice-based like "Hey
Siri/Google/etc, I'd like a sandwich" and a sandwich is ordered and delivered
to you. "Tweet 'Who's down for a sandwich party?'" and a tweet is tweeted.

Whenever I hear or read someone argue that "command line is the future" I
think of my dad; barely able to make a bookmark in a browser and not really
knowing how folders work. And he's been using a Mac for decades.

~~~
code_duck
Typing to Siri or Google is essentially a command line interface.

------
6d0debc071
One of the huge limitations for text based interfaces is the same as the
elephant in the room for people starting programming, especially when they
start dealing with others libraries/modules: It's not easily discoverable if
you don't know what to look for - there's no intuition. A GUI, at least one
that's reasonably well-designed, you can play around in and learn fairly
quickly.

Having seen the pain of many users even when trying to dig down through a GUI
they're unfamiliar with, I think that while text based interface are often
more powerful there's a long way to go before they're more popular.

------
bshimmin
An almost comically ridiculous premise. "/partyline create:task Blah" requires
a user to remember both the initial slash and then that two words must be
joined with a colon, with no spaces. There's a reason why many companies have
"Find us on Facebook" rather than a URL - because regular people are bad at
understanding computer syntax; slashes and colons and joining up words without
spaces are more or less unique to using a computer, and people who don't have
to program computers for a living really don't care to learn their
idiosyncrasies.

------
codingdave
The headline does not match the article. The article raves about one
particular feature on Slack, then shows that their tool works well with it.
This is not an article about UI. This is marketing.

Even worse, it is marketing that failed -- all it has done here is invoke
disagreement from a tech community.

~~~
llamataboot
Well, it did get an add for Partyline on the frontpage of HN. Not sure that's
failing, even if people disagree with your premise.

------
placeybordeaux
This is a really shallow post, it doesn't deal with any of the complexities
involved and just makes an unsubstantiated statement.

------
cubano
Multi-line chat in BBS's in the 1980s used slash-commands such as these in
chat apps...I'm sure I'm not the only one here old enough to remember those.

Sigh...like so many other things, what is old is new again.

Forcing people used to touch interaction with their phones to grok command
line UX seems more like wishful thinking then the Next Thing.

~~~
Albright
Yep. Slack is a pretty poor re-implementation of IRC, and I'm pretty bummed
both my previous and my current company forced me to use it.

If we're going to go this route, let's at least use something not so
patronizing and infantile, like HipChat.

And I'm pretty sick of all these "Slack is going to change/has changed THE
WORLD!!!" articles in general.

~~~
mbrock
You don't love it when software soothes you during loading screens with cuddly
inspirational messages?

------
brudgers
Regardless of whether the author is right, it's worth thinking about because
it may well be the case that humans have a better affinity for graphic
representations of spoken language than for pictorial representations of
things in the world.

Ordinary people type web addresses into browsers...or heaven forfend, at least
"microsoft" into their Google toolbar for IE8. There's a point at which
information redundancy is overwhelming even for people who don't care about
information theory or how the web works or anything else.

The WIMP interface was a great innovation. But it was built for a time when
women were in the typing pool, entrepreneurs were called "businessmen" and
managers were afraid of catching keyboard kooties. The meteor hit and CEO's
type their own correspondence and answer phone calls on their direct line
[which lives in their pocket].

There's a case [and a reasonable counter case] to be made that WIMP was the
installation program for widespread computing. Once the important system is up
and running it can be discarded. The degree to which this is plausible
correlates to the inverse to which one sees WIMP as an end in itself.
Yesterday, it was rounded corners on shiny buttons, today it's flat sharp
corners. In the interim, people have learned from experience that pixels can't
cut human fingers. A buggy whip industry would count this as progress.

------
sperling75
Text as UI success I believe is tied to how connected the related task is to
the messaging tool you are in and how easy the platform makes it for the user.
There are a number of tasks that could be good text candidates in a slack
interface such as project management, time calendaring, tools used by the
slack team. I think it's silly to jump to the conclusion that text is the
future of ui. I would agree that text is making a come back for relevant tasks
within popular messaging tools.

------
copsarebastards
The future of Slack is that they'll do what every other chat application has
done in the past 2 decades: they keep "innovating" on a solved problem, add
"features" that get in people's way to the point that it becomes unusable and
people switch to the new "disrupting chat technology". It happened to HipChat
before Slack and I doubt Slack will break the cycle.

Given that I don't think I'll be looking to Slack as "the future of UI".

------
heshamg
I agree with the idea of the article. But it will not be limited to slack,
check out the home page of this Ride Sharing service for example:
[https://www.wadeeny.com](https://www.wadeeny.com) (disclosure, I am a co-
founder)

I am the one who designed it, and I can confidently say that engagement is way
higher than using traditional forms and button. The bounce rate is extremely
low, almost everyone at least tries interacting with the bot.

Now this is not a testimony that text will always beat traditional web UI, I
think a big factor in this case is the fact that it seems so unconventional
and people are curious to try it out. Also depends on the purpose of the
interface you are creating. Like 1971genocide pointed out, UI is good for
giving commands and not learning for example.

In our case, it was important for us to get a limited number of very precise
information from the user. Therefore having a Text based interface worked out.

~~~
mogwely
it is actually very interactive, and does draw people in to enter the
information. I think there should be a healthy mix between UI and Text to
achieve a good usability which is what you and slack do

------
reggieband
I very much disagree. Computing is going more and more towards integrated
devices (phones, tablets, etc.) and companies are making serious investment in
voice. Siri, Cortana, Amazon Fire, even my PS4 claims it can be controlled
with voice. Once this reaches a certain level of utility it will become
dominant. "Hey computer, open that word document I was working on yesterday.
No, the one about the Davis merger".

That is more a long-term goal. Currently the future of UI is physics systems.
The little bit of UI animation that happens today often uses interpolation
routines (e.g. easing in it's many forms). Interpolation is time based and has
annoying limitations like it is hard to coordinate multiple animations, it is
hard to update animations smoothly on the fly and it can be non-trivial to
reverse out of an in-progress animation.

I think we'll see a strong movement towards natural looking physical based
movement throughout the UI.

~~~
mbrock
Neal Stephenson's essay "In the Beginning was the Command Line" has this bit:

> Americans' preference for mediated experiences is obvious enough, and I'm
> not going to keep pounding it into the ground. I'm not even going to make
> snotty comments about it—after all, I was at Disney World as a paying
> customer. But it clearly relates to the colossal success of GUIs and so I
> have to talk about it some. Disney does mediated experiences better than
> anyone. If they understood what OSes are, and why people use them, they
> could crush Microsoft in a year or two.

There's so much expertise in animation, games, 3D, physics, illustration etc
while most UIs are boring, boxy, and slow. The UIs inside of simulated
computers in computer games are cooler than the actual UIs!

I wonder what will happen with virtual reality UIs. With movement tracking you
could really get next-level point and click. I want my IDE to be a VR
spaceship mission where I write code with some kind of sign language syntax!

------
duaneb
Slack is not text. Slack is an engine designed to provide multimedia in
specific, arbitrary formats. The fact that you can modify things by typing
text does not make an argument that the future of UI is text.... maybe event
streams and highly leverage-able tools, but that's not intrinsic to text.

------
digi_owl
Jef Raskin[0]'s Archy[1] anyone?

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Raskin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Raskin)

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy)

------
JabavuAdams
So graphic designers are going to use text, instead of Photoshop?

Pixar artists will be switching to CLI, over direct-manipulation graphical
interfaces?

Sound-designers will use text to look at waveforms?

The title is overly broad because it focuses on only a certain class of
applications.

------
avodonosov
I share this view and even use this idea in some of my projects (for example
at [http://testsheet.biz](http://testsheet.biz) the test tree is edited in a
plain text form. This allows to edit several tree nodes at once, including the
whole tree; and also to quickly move groups of tests around by copy/paste; to
introduce new nodes quickly. So, much quicker and easier that in any tree
widget).

Together with intelligent completion (similar to programming environments)
text UI could in many cases be significantly more convenient than widgets for
mouse. And it can be much cheaper develop.

------
potatohead00
A much more interesting discussion of this topic
[http://cristal.inria.fr/~weis/info/commandline.html](http://cristal.inria.fr/~weis/info/commandline.html)

------
nthnb
In 2007 Donald Norman wrote a piece on command-line interfaces that's pretty
cogent:
[http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/ui_breakthroughcomma.html](http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/ui_breakthroughcomma.html)

Text UI is a great way to hide complexity but difficult to teach and form
habits around. The learning curve is steep and probably something we need to
invest more in because "have you read the man page" isn't gonna cut it for
most.

------
kimdouglasmason
Waste-of-time advertisement posing as article is waste-of-time.

------
LukeB42
Fortunately I've just released an ncurses wrapper that deals in printing
strings exactly how they're formatted.

To update the view call update_content(0,"Some\nLines.") on the appropriate
Pane object.

[https://pypi.python.org/pypi/window](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/window)

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1971genocide
Text is good for efficiency.

Not for learning. When I see a UI of an app - I can at one instant see all the
possible things that can be done using it.

text starts becoming a problem when their is a combinatronical explosion in
what you can do with your app.

I cannot imagine Photoshop, Maya or After Effects to be text based.

Its a fairly interesting computer science question to me.

~~~
ddingus
The MEL language is a huge part of MAYA, and it's the guts that do lots of the
work. Part of the magic of MAYA is the killer GUI for making models, etc...

The real heavy lifting comes from the tight integration between MEL and that
GUI, which permits all sorts of things to be made and then quickly manipulated
using the SAME MAYA GUI.

~~~
1971genocide
I agree - having done Python programming in Maya. The scripting allows you to
really super-charge your work.

But What I meant is When I started working with Maya initially - I was already
put off by the extremely complex GUI. Trying to program ? I do not think many
programmers appreciative the deep learning curve needed - and the average
modeler is not adequately equiped.

~~~
ddingus
I had similar experiences. And that applied to MCAD too, not just general 3D
modeling. That is a complex UI space to manage.

The data is complex, there are nearly always multiple interaction modes,
selections, etc... going on too.

Back when I learned on 8 bit computers, it was kind of easy because they
didn't do much. One soon found themselves into the guts of the machine doing
assembly language to make any magic happen. All from books, magazines, peers,
etc...

Looking at listings was high value.

Well, today we've got YouTube and it's awesome! I can watch somebody model, or
program, or do both.

It is a deep curve, but we've got so much better learning now. Back when I
learned CAD and things like MAYA, I had to do it old school. Get the book, go.
I had the advantage of some peers who would give me some help, or do a quick
tutorial. Know what? I videotaped one of those, a little precursor to what we
have today.

There is a worry I have of hobbling great UI models by over engineering this
learning curve bit. Where we can simplify, we should, but not at the expense
of the peak use capability possible by experienced and adept users.

MAYA, and many CAD packages are bending that line, and it hurts at times.
People who know their stuff could be sharing it just as much as relearning or
working around the changes needed to reduce the need for said sharing.

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neilni
Isn't this called ChatOps? Slack acts as an hub for all the api wrappers. Ex:
you should be able to type commands that execute on behave of you rather than
ssh into your machine to type the same command. The title should read the
future of DevOps is chat. UI is a different topic

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mschuster91
Bit-related sidenote: Does anyone know a way to position the cursor inside a
terminal running bash when editing a command except navigating with the
left/right arrow keys?

This is by far the thing that eats the most time when I'm working on the
commandline.

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ddingus
I personally would frame this as "the console" and it's the place where one
can input text in the interface, and it may well be a secondary, external
channel apart from the main or primary GUI.

All that has been done before. It should be done more.

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Kiro
I don't think there's any substance in this claim. The examples are very
niched.

~~~
johansch
The whole post is just a thinly masked ad...

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amirouche
A few years back there was plenty of text based interfaces like gnome-do. IIRC
there is a web cli extension for firefox that is based on RDF intents which
allows to command website using text.

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singold
If the future of interfaces is foing to be text, i think it will be more
because minecraft playing children than slack users, just my 2c

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spo81rty
I use slack everyday. I didn't know it did any of the stuff mentioned in this
article. That's the problem command line.

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SZJX
A good title to promote your product, sure, but there's little substance or
truth in the claim really.

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d08ble
Future is the matrix. Animation CPU said, that text is form, all user
manipulations will be in native form - voice, touch, think, where text is
local case.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubNfWarTawI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubNfWarTawI)
\- how UI replication will be used in the matrix

[http://acpul.tumblr.com/](http://acpul.tumblr.com/)

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tiger10guy
[https://vimeo.com/115154289](https://vimeo.com/115154289)

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paulddraper
The future of UI is text....specifically Hypertext Markup Language.

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SandersAK
Makes argument for text. Uses images to illustrate point.

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pjmlp
The future is the Xerox PARC paradigm, not AT&T.

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cmadan
Anything like Partyline for Bitbucket? :)

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atarian
So that's why Apple products are selling so poorly.

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ranjith7393
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