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Loading ...In praise of the command line interface
Alex Watson
There was a time when Windows was just a program like any other; you could load it and you could quit it, but you didn’t need to live in it. In fact, because this was a time when Windows was 3.0, not having to live there permanently was definitely a good thing. Since Windows 95 though, the START menu and the icons have become the place the vast majority of PC users permanetly do their computing. DOS and other ‘command line’ interfaces aren’t really used if you’re on a Microsoft run PC.
A mouse and a graphical user interface are great for complex tasks such as editing a photo, but for enabling quick access to commonly used stuff, they’re slow: for starters, icons take up a lot of space, so when you have many apps, they need to be kept in folders. It then takes time to make the physical movement with the mouse to go and get these icons.
It’s like storing all your clothes in a wardrobe; neat and tidy, yes, but getting dressed requires sifting through a lot of stuff, especially if you have an idea beforehand of what you want. If you could just say ‘the smart blue shirt’ and have it appear, that would be much quicker.
And that’s what (if you’re a reasonably quick typer) a command line interface can do. Well, at least it can do it for your computer stuff. It’s not much good at moving shirts…
I’ve been using a neat little app command line app called Launchy for a while now, and can’t live without it. Hit your hotkey (CTRL+space for me) and up pops the window; type the first few letters of what you want - FI for Firefox, or BLO for my blog admin page - and Launchy then displays a list of stuff for you to choose from. This is similar to pressing WINDOWS+R to access the ‘Run’ command, but Launchy can be configured to add whole directories and individual files as well as apps, making it superior. It does take some time to configure as the default config is pretty bare bones but it’s worth taking the time to build up an index of files, programmes and directories you regularly use as it can really make simple tasks much quicker.
Sounds pretty good, I always found the command line interface useful when I was programming so this should be very useful to me. 
A command line for Windows, oh the irony 