The Return of the Command Line
February 15th, 2007 by Owen JohnsonLooks like the folks over at Humanized have brought the command line back to Windows in an exquisitely elegant way with a product called Enso.
Enso has beautiful interaction and visual design, as does the Humanized website. Easy to install and easy to use, especially for folks familiar with command line environments, Enso returns a feeling of control and productivity to the Windows desktop. I expect the Enso model will translate well to any computer system with a windowing user interface paradigm.
I’d like to extend my sincerest thanks to the Humanized team, I’ve been waiting years for someone to do a great implementation of this concept. My only request at this time: a ‘locate’ concept so I can eliminate the need to use Window’s clunky search tools.
Check out http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/
The Quicksilver application for OS X also has brought the CLI back to a desktop environment. It also has a plugin architecture which lends itself to deeper hooks in the OS and resident apps on the system.
Hi Owen,
Thanks for the kind words. I just wanted to let you know that we are planning on integrating Desktop Search support into Enso in the future. It will probably harness GDS and the Vista desktop search: no need to reinvent the wheel.
I’m glad to learn of both the Quicksilver pointer and the fact that Enso will be adding desktop search. On the Enso search front, quick and easy is all that is necessary. Something like “find <arg>” that pops open a simple list of files that contain <arg> in their name or “findin <arg>” that finds all files that contain <arg>. Anything to get around having to click-through the Windows search interface.
don’t mean to be a pain, but isn’t this a complete clone of Katapult?
http://katapult.kde.org/screenshots
Same idea, same translucent interface and darn… same logo!