GNOME Terminal - Command Summary [Mockup]

RSS Feed - Comments↴ Author: Jacob Barkdull on Friday, November 19 2010

So we all know that users who are new to the command-line find it intimidating, no matter what operating system, they just find it intimidating. These users are the kind of people who never used early Unix or MS-DOS, they were introduced to computers with graphics and point-and-click interfaces.

And I've been wondering: What's so intimidating? I know for a fact that some people know what the command-line is, they know its power, a simple mix-up of the 'dd' command's 'if' and 'of' options and your drive is broken, and that alone is intimidating enough to avoid it. More so than that is its complete lack of positive reassurance, there aren't many options, and there is little to no feedback.

I am talking about most default graphical command-line interfaces here. In Windows "cmd.exe" doesn't have very many options, and in GNOME on GNU/Linux "gnome-terminal" has more options, but just for things like font size, font color, window title, background color, number of lines, and compatibility. And that's good, keep it simple, it's a command-line interface, I need it to start fast and do one thing, display command output.

With that said, I think GNOME Terminal could use a simple graphical way to reassure its user that the commands he/she is typing are going to do what he/she wants. Here is my mockup of how this would work.

Type one of four commands: rm, fdisk, shutdown, or apt-get (it has a few bugs.)
jake@tildehash:~#
This was only tested in IceWeasel 3.6 (Firefox 3.6) and Epiphany. Here's an image if it doesn't look right.

As you can see, my idea is to simply make a two-line bottom pane appear displaying the short description already available in each command's manual (e.g. man rm) as a user types in a command. Also clicking a command at anytime would bring the bottom pane back up.

GNOME Terminal - Mockup
Commands would be clickable, appearing with either a surrounding box or an underline when the mouse is over them.

I believe this at the very least would help prevent the "rm -rf /" tricks people pull on newcomers in various forums. Good idea or did I just somehow make a fool of myself?
What Is This Place?
TildeHash is a website for Tech articles revolving around Free Software and Unix/Unix-like operating systems, written by Jacob Barkdull and various contributors, respectively. Meaning, Free Software (or Open Source); and GNU/Linux (or simply Linux), BSD, OpenSolaris, or Haiku; respectively. The main goal of TildeHash is to be different -- the name alone is a little different (explanation here) -- but to do it in a useful way.

TildeHash is about discussing Free Software topics that are beneficial to our community, topics that are largely not discussed nor shown. "Free Software" is also often called "Open Source Software". In practice the requirements are identical, although because the term "open" doesn't call to mind freedom, it misses the point.

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