It’s said that history repeats itself every twenty years, especially with fashion or music. Twenty-plus years ago computers were manipulated using text commands at the command prompt of DOS or UNIX.
Macintosh and Windows ushered in the Graphical User Interface (GUI) and made the command line near obsolete except for the most technical of users. I’ve thought back to the old days of the C: prompt and the relative simplicity of getting things done. To compare with conventional English grammar, an action verb, adjective, and subject was all that was necessary.
find "milk" *.txt
dir /s todolist.txt
Modern GUIs provide shortcut keys like Ctrl-S to save and Cmd-P to print but that’s all. What if we could do just a little more? A blending of old-school command line with the GUI.
According to BetaNews, Mozilla is experimenting with Ubiquity, software to provide command line functionality within their browser software. It’s akin to what QuickSilver can be made to do but intrinsic to the host application. Whether Ubiquity is an improvement to QuickSilver is yet to be realized but it’s an interesting effort for advanced users.
Ubiquity is available as a free download for Firefox.
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