Hi, everybody Recently, a guy noticed that I was using it and asked why? For me it because in Linux many things are done through the terminal because Linux has many different desktop environments
He also compared terminal commands with cheat codes in GTA and other games, he understands what benefits you take from them, but not from terminal commands
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
I do a bit of programming. Git help is about terminal commands. There are graphical front ends but I have to learn how to use them. I use terminal also for package management for the same reasons.
I’d say is similar with any source control software. It’s the same with me and Fossil. (And, granted, there are less plugins to support Fossil in IDEs; the one in Visual Studio Code/Codium does OK.)
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.
It’s very fast and nearly always gives me the results I want without extra bullshit. For example using bc or qalc to do a quick unit conversion vs launching a calculator app for the same purpose.
Why not? It’s simple, lightweight, has a lot of interesting commands that fills its respective niche really well (btop, for instance) and (the best of all) it doesn’t explode my PC everytime I run such commands.
Why should i open discover, wait half a year for it to load, search for vlc, wait half a year, look if its not a flatpak, realise its a flatpak, repeat
If i could just type sudo pacman -S vlc?
Or search how to update my grub config if I could just type grub-mkconfig -o /mnt/Boot/grub/grub.cfg?
Because there is no native gui. For most things to configure in Linux there is a webui but not a simple Gui built in. Configuration files like squid.conf smb.conf nginx.com… then we have logs but here I think I never checked for a Gui, does it work for remote ssh easily? Can you restart service easy?
I use the terminal in a variety of circumstances (like working on Node.js and other programming projects) where there is either no good GUI alternative or using a CLI is actually faster. I’ve been using computers since 1989 and my first operating system was MS-DOS, so the thought of using a CLI when necessary doesn’t bother me.
Nice choice. Try to stick to the standard repository, kinda like the Play store on android.
I believe Mint tries to have minimal dependence on the command line. But usually it’s easier to help others solve problems with the command line since that is easier to write out than how to click through menus. So don’t let it scare you too much.
The internet is a friendlier place now, at least in the linux help-o-sphere. People don’t let others post destructive “lessons” for people to learn anymore.
That was comment I wrote in a thread about distro recommendations. I think it provides a context in which CL has a clear advantage over GUI.
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