So you think you’re old school, huh?  You still remember those old DOS commands?  You can cd, or mkdir, or run a netstat -b faster than nobody’s business?  Well the seemingly outdated Command Line Interface seems to be making a comeback.

And the crazy part… you’re already using it on a daily basis.

According to UI Design visionary Donald Norman, “command line interfaces are back again, hiding under the name of search”.  Today’s search engines are becoming much more than just an input field, and users interact with them in a much more complex manner.

Take Google for example.  Users no longer just search for something, instead, they tell “Google” what they want it to do, or they “command” it to tell them what they want to know.

“What is the capitol of that country?”
“When is the that holiday?”
“Translate this.”
“Define that.”

And Google dilgently gives you the answer.

But for those that are used to more powerful commands, the super users, don’t fret… your tools are here too.  Actual command line web applications are popping up as well.  One of the more popular and powerful is Mozilla’s Ubiquity.  With commands such as “translate”, “calculate”, “email”, “check weather” as well as social media commands such as “yelp”, “twitter”, “tinyurl”, Ubiquity compacts normal everyday tasks into a simple sequence of keystrokes. It even lets you define your own commands.

References:
Article by Don Norman (no relation): http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/ui_breakthroughcomma.html

Link to Mozilla’s Ubiquity:
http://ubiquity.mozilla.com/