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I never said it was the same thing, and I'm a little insulted that you'd think I did. Of course a shell is different from Spotlight or even Start->Run. But they do share the basic UI paradigm of typing in commands rather than graphically navigating to them, because that paradigm is more usable for many tasks.

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My apologies; looking back at what I wrote, I realize I did respond harshly. Your comment (and you) deserved more courtesy than that...

I guess my disagreement stems from the fact that I don't see what I type into those boxes as commands (even though some search boxes, like the one in the Windows start menu, can work that way). I think of those boxes as fixed to one command, search, and all I get to type are parameters.

Yes, but what you type into a shell is just parameters to a system call ;)

Seriously though, from the user standpoint, typing "vim" into the shell and typing "TextMate" into Spotlight are more similar to each other than either of them are to navigating through the Finder and double-clicking TextMate, or even clicking it on the dock. The shell is smarter, but perhaps too smart for some users.

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