Why do you use the terminal?

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

antihumanitarian,

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.

Goun,

Repeatibility (is that a word?) and scriptability. I find CLI tools easier to work with and easier to get information from them.

dreugeworst,

Because you can’t (easily) program gui apps to automate tasks, but combining a few terminal programs to get more complex behaviour is really easy

letsgo,

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.

art,
@art@lemmy.world avatar

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.

Presi300,
@Presi300@lemmy.world avatar

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

cetvrti_magi,
@cetvrti_magi@lemmy.world avatar

Because I prefer using keyboard for almost everything and in most cases terminal is faster than GUI.

8tomat8,

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.

M500,

It is quick. it does not need to load a bunch of things and in certain tasks, I can do multiple things at once.

I also find it easier to navigate and edit files with tab to complete.

toastal,

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.

AngryDemonoid,

It’s just way faster for me most of the time. I can hit F12, do what I need, and be done without messing around with a mouse or touchpad.

Dio9sys,

I like using the terminal because of 3 main reasons:

  1. I like using my keyboard
  2. I like doing multiple things in one window
  3. Verbosity

I’m pretty quick with typing, but sometimes I can’t see !y mouse at first, so it’s just faster for me to type out what I want to do as long as I know the right arguments for it.

My average workflow at work as me doing frequent saml logins and going between multiple kinds of databases. It’s just easier for me to run the saml cli command and then run the SQL CLI command I need instead of messing with datagrip settings and stuff. Also I recreationally run some servers and it’s just easier to ssh into the server, make the changes I need in something like nano or the redis CLI tools and then log back out. This means I’m just plain more comfortable on the terminal in certain situations like config editing, writing posts for my gemini capsule, etc.

Sometimes when I run a GUI program I’ll get big loud silence and don’t know what to do. In that case I genuinely enjoy using the terminal and running an equivalent command with verbosity settings so I can see what it’s doing or not and can track down any errors.

On top of those reasons, I’ve been playing with RISC-V architecture lately and, while the xorg riscv64 port is admirable, I just get better performance rn by running my RISC stuff through tty.

I recognize that not everybody is going to have the same use case and workflows as me, but I’m pretty comfortable with what I’ve got 😅

beeng,
  • verbosity

That mean you install powershell on linux?

Dio9sys,

No, I just run everything with -vvvvvvvvvv so I can see my computer yelling at me

beeng,

-vvvvvvvvv makes everything CAPS?

digdilem,

Only one of the ~250 linux machines I maintain has a gui.

danielfgom,
@danielfgom@lemmy.world avatar

To be honest I hardly use it. I’m on Linux Mint Debian Edition and the built in updater does a great job. So I find myself never using the terminal

tsonfeir,
@tsonfeir@lemm.ee avatar

Lynx is faster 😎

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