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
I think about it like a tree structure for both. With a gui you have to move your mouse around to various places, with a cli each character branches off into another tree. Mathematically you can handle more options faster with a CLI.
For simple tasks you don’t need CLI. Most GUIs implement basic workflows and do a reasonable job at it (obviously not counting the ridiculous amount of time Windows needs to “compute space requirements” while deleting an empty directory. Seems it’s more important to get that little popup on screen and run the animation a few times than actually doing the job).
It’s when you get past the basics that CLI comes into its own. Those grindy things you do in Windows clicking one thing at a time? Glue a couple of commands together in the CLI and it’s done in a tiny fraction of the time.
Some applications take some time to load up visual elements that you don’t need before you can start using it. When you got a lot of work to do sometimes that just slows you down.
A lot of CLI programs do one thing and do it well while also working excellently in custom scripts.
Makes me feel like a hacker and makes other ppl think that I’m smarter than I am… That and there are certain things that are just more convenient through the terminal
Because I’m forced to use a Mac at work. So to avoid their terrible UI, I use the terminal for most of the things. Then switching back to Linux is relatively easy.
Also it is faster in most cases and it’s keyboard-first.
I can use Fish’s history to jog my brain on actions I don’t quite remember. Remembering a sequence of screen menus to click thru is often much more tedious & error-prone. And when you have a commonly repeated process, it’s trivial to script because shell scripts are, well, scripts for that terminal shell.
Also the terminals applications are hella portable. I can use ssh/mosh over the network & have a similar or exact environment as my main PC on a remote box. vi was always a good enough editor.
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