One of the other commenter made the analogy of being in a restaurant. With a mouse you can only point and grunt at things to communicate when you want. A terminal let’s you speak out your order and any other requests you might have.
I am on Windows as my workstation, but my servers run Linux, why should I install X/Wayland and VNC to manage my servers when even the later versions of Windows comes with an ssh client?
When I run linux with a gui, I mainly use the terminal as I sm more used to that rather than relearning a GUI.
For me it’s because it’s much quicker and reliable for most use cases. Also the commands are roughly the same across many many of my systems (AIX, macos, and Linux distros)
The terminal is like a direct access to do things on the computer. A GUI is a program someone made to do a task the way he envisioned it to be done. If this task is not exactly what you need, you’re out of luck.
If I need to rename a file, yeah, I can do that by right-clicking it in the file explorer, and selecting ‘rename’ from the menu. Two files? Painful but doable. Three files? Oh hell no, I’m switching to my always-open-in-background terminal window, and write a quick c=1; for f in *.jpeg; do mv “$f” $c.jpeg; c=expr $c + 1 ; done and it takes twice less time than clicking things through with mouse.
And yes, I wrote that shell command off the top of my head on the first try and without edits.
I’m sorry, I’m too old to learn emacs over my perfect knowledge of Midnight Commander.
The point of this topic was to tell why we are using terminal, and emacs is kind of terminal on steroids, there are like 1000 key bindings and the mouse is totally optional, you are proving the point even further.
The Thunar bulk renamer is relatively good, but recently I wanted to name images based on the capture date. Probably very tedious without the right GUI tool, while it’s just one line using exiftool in the terminal. (I don’t know it off the top of my head)
Similarly, I just extracted the audio only from a video using ffmpeg in like 10s. ffmpeg -i video.mkv -c:a copy out.mka
Everyone’s different idk. I myself love command line. I have enjoyed Linux for a long time but it didn’t really become my daily driver until recently. I find it very rare that I use the GUI for more than gaming and watching stuff. Everything else is command line. I’ve had friends refuse to try Linux due to the “requirement” of needing to do stuff in command line. When I showed them some newer distros that appeal to users who don’t really feel comfortable with command lines.
Are there any programs that can animate a cat to chase my mouse across the desktop? Or a guy who runs up window borders and tries to wrangle the mouse?
I tried oneko for a day and wow… not my thing. Constant distraction and I didn’t get much done that day, lol. Not recommended for the work computer at least.
Command line is a lot more powerful for a lot of cases. Most CLI programs are written with the idea that the caller might be another program, so they tend to be easy to chain with pipes and redirection. So you have tons of simple tools that you can combine however you need.
For me the difference between a cli and a gui is like asking someone to do something speaking in a language they can understand and doing it just by pointing at things and doing gestures. It's enough for ordering at a restaurant, but for more complex tasks it gets ridiculous, even at a restaurant you'll get better results if you can ask for some information and understand what the server says
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