The austere black and white canvas. The colon slash angle bracketed hieroglyphics. The intimidating pulse of a Dennis Hopper-esque cursor - "What are you gonna do, Jack?" Ah yes, MS-DOS was quite an introduction to the world of computing.
How lucky I was, it seemed at the time, to be going through college in an era when the Taliban of operating systems was being overthrown by the Emperor with more clothes - Windows 3.0. This new, friendly face of computing was going to save mankind from the 'nod and a wink' nonchalance of the contemptuous cursor!
But six years of working with WIMPs followed by three years with Solaris workstations rekindled my respect for the humble command line. Or rather for the efficiency of keyboard input. The mouse may be one of the greatest inventions of the modern age but it's got a lot to answer for in terms of overall efficacy. Has anyone estimated the distance covered by the average on-screen pointer, per year? I'd bet it's to the moon and back!
What provokes this bout of nostalgia? Paul Watson's post questioning the command line comeback?
"An interesting SMS project over in India is proving to be popular with farmers. Twitter is a presence command line, YubNub an internet command line and IM bot systems like IMIS are coming out into the open... When I use Gmail or Google Reader I use the keyboard almost exclusively... All in all the command line and the keyboard are reclaiming some lost-ground that the mouse ate."
Agreed. I too make extensive use of keyboard shortcuts in Google Reader. But I must admit my feed reading has been getting more and more inefficient overall. I'm now subscribed to 420 feeds and it seems that for every 3 from which I unsubscribe I subscribe to 4 new ones. This has got to stop!
Actually, I'm trying out a new strategy. While I'll always subscribe to a core set of important feeds I'm going to start grazing more and more in future. Afterall grazing is all about about being able to skim groups of feeds without subscribing so it's the perfect model for monitoring Twitter updates for instance. Here's what I did -
- Uploaded an OPML file of Irish Twitter feeds (OPML) to Grazr (which I'll continue to update with new users feeds)
- Customized the widget to occupy a full page in outline view
- Dragged the resulting Irish Tweets link into my Firefox Bookmarks toolbar
- Right clicked on the bookmark to edit the properties and give it a keyword of "twi"
So, now anytime I want to take a peep at Irish tweets I just type "Ctrl+t" to open a new Firefox tab, followed by "twi+Enter". That's it. Takes about one second for a touch typist. I can then navigate the feeds with a combination of arrow keys - down arrow to highlight the first feed, right arrow to open it. Left arrow to close it and choose another.
I think I'm going to export the OPML for a few more of my lesser read Google Reader folders and setup similar bookmarks for further 'command line' feed reading.
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