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I mean, legitimately, unless you’re doing power user things, you don’t really need the terminal. And if you are doing power user things, then find me a Windows power user that has never used the command prompt or powershell.
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I mean, legitimately, unless you’re doing power user things, you don’t really need the terminal.
This is a fairly recent development, though. Last time I tried Linux I was using the terminal several times a week just browsing the internet and playing games. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how infrequently I have to use it now, but I was surprised given my previous experience.
fair enough, I only switched to Linux last February. I do remember it being an absolute pain in the ass in the mid 2010s, I’ve tried linux a few times over the years. But insofar as now goes, on Mint, the terminal is much the same as the command prompt or PowerShell in windows – nice for power user functionality, but generally unnecessary for the average user.
On CLI I figure out the command I need once.
Put it in a script.
Cron it if I want it to be daemonized.
Never think about it ever again.
Anti-CLI folks just have a bad workflow.
They see the script as the end, when in reality it’s a foundation. I rarely look at my foundation. I build on it.
With this workflow I have dozens, hundreds, or thousand of automatic actions that “just work”. Idk, works for me.
That said, if you prefer to click yourself to RSI to accomplish the same task, who am I to judge. I just watch and nod until I’m asked for a suggestion.
Yes 100%. I used to search the same problems over and over again until I started doing this. Plus this way you can also version them with git and deploy them to other devices.
i imagine a perfect world in which everything has guis and the guis contain all the information I could want about what it does including the relevant terminal commands. In this way, the gui is also the manual.
People complain KDE has too many settings and option while they are so much less that few cli programs combined. Imagine how cluttered that UI has to be
a cluttered ui that works is better than a pretty ui that doesn’t.
I don’t disagree but some people hates that kde has a lot of options
solution: a checkbox for “show advanced settings”.
also, sounds like i should try kde
CLI this, GUI that. Where are my TUI degens?
Htop is TUI indeed
I love btop, too, though I tried out gotop and it was actually pretty slick.
Then there’s my love, Midnight Commander, but Yazi, Ranger, and Superfile are all great alternatives. TUI file managers are the best compromise between the dangerous
sudo rmand the sometimes overbearing GUI file managers.I use GUI and CLI evenly and TUI really hits that sweet spot for me.
TUI gang rise up
My TUI would be better if I could remember how to spell ncmpcpp without tab completion
- nc - ncurses
- mpc - music player client
- cpp - C plus plus
My brain knows, but my fingers get lost along the way.
I am an elder millennial who never forgot the MS-DOS commands of my childhood. So I would kick that guys arse!
when i was a kid i used to make fake autoexec.bat scripts that did nothing just to pretend :3
I never touched that file. Actually wait I did. I put in a quick script to run the Gmouse.exe. Basically to run the mouse driver which you had to do manually every time! But with it there you could automate it and not worry about it.
Ahh, gmouse…pkunzip (which I called Punk unzip). Fun times.
You’re not Neo.
Use a UI like a grown up
I used to be on the yelling guys side and boy was I wrong. I now write scripts to do anything repetitive, all the time and it’s great. I have a whole library of them I use and add to and improve all the time.
Yeah, I was wrong.
It always makes me kind of sad when people disparage CLI use. It’s like people thinking they don’t need to actually learn anything because they can always look up what they need to know on their phone. It seems a shame to miss so much of the richness of the experience. I found myself arguing, promoting, whatever, terminal use a few times and then realized how pointless it is. It’s like arguing with someone about what food they like. You can just hope they develop a more sophisticated palate at some point, or at least become more open-minded, but you can’t force it on them.
This was a long way to get around to saying I like that you had that change of frame and are embracing the fun of personalizing your interactions with your computer.
Thanks! Yeah, for me it’s that I have a bad memory so memorizing argument orders and things like that felt painful. Scripting is the solution! And you learn while you do it. It’s actually kind of fun to make a solid script that works between various OSes as nerdy as that is. I’ve taken a lot of typing and memorization and turned it into writing (ideally solid) software that allows me to type 1-3 words instead of 20 words. It’s satisfying. And you’re right, it’s something people won’t get until they come to it on their own terms.
At work I routinely do laborious tasks the rest of my team procrastinates due to how repetitive and annoying it is. And often it’s with a command or two. It feels quite powerful. And it’s so flexible how you can combine languages and tools! It’s also just interesting to be reminded how all the basic problems were solved by the 1970s when a lot of these tools were created.
Works other way around too
meanwhile Windows users: let me drop into this random strangers discord who claims he will make my PC faster by dropping this .bat file that will run thousands of commands to “debloat” my install. also let me edit the registry and add random values to keys that I don’t know what they’re used for. this process is basically irreversible because I will inevitably forget which keys I’ve edited over time, wow windows is so simple and easy and intuitive 🤡
That’s not a windows problem, it’s a user problem. The same scenario could play out with a shell script that modifies a hundred dotfiles. Lots of solutions on Linux help forums are “Paste this into your terminal. Don’t forget the sudo!”
Amen. I remember having to frequently reinstall the system to keep it performant. Thanks windows rot.
I used to reinstall Windows once a year. Now with Debian stable I just fix the problem if there is any and that’s it.
I actually used to make backups (Export) of each edited key and keep them in folders with context, so I could later look them up or even set them again in case of a reinstall.
Now, they are lying, forgotten, on some NTFS drive that I haven’t opened in years.
I wonder if registry keys can be set with an ansible script? Granted, that is still not as nice as a declarative config (yay NixOS), but better than having to write down and do by hand again on a new install
yeah,
reg set <key> <value>i think it is
CLI is effective because every command serves a specific purpose. UIs are the opposite, you have to imagine all possible intentions the user could have at any given point and then indicate possible actions, intuitively block impossible actions, and recover from pretty much any error.
CLI is effective also because of its history (i.e. one can go back, repeat a command as-is or edit it then repeat) but also the composability of its components. If one made a useful command before, it can be combined with another useful command.
Rinse & repeat and it makes for a very powerful tool.
The Unix principle of piping between two or even multiple programs, together with “all data should be in the simplest common format possible” (that is, largely unformatted strings), was a really clever invention to be popularized. As proven by the fact it is still so useful decades later on a myriad of computers unimaginably more powerful than what they had back then.
It’s not perfect by any means (alternative title: why something like Nushell exists), but it’s pretty good all things considered I dare say.
Absolutely. I learned about that decades ago as a teenager and never would I have thought it would still be useful today… yet, in 2025 if you want to do anything powerful, in the cloud, on your phone, even in your XR headset, it is STILL relevant!
PS: I project I’m contributing to on the topic https://nlnet.nl/project/xrsh/ ideas welcomed!
It’s wild that Linux stans are such masochists that they believe they can convert people to loving abuse, instead of just making the interface better to attract users.
I’ve found that one of the best things to do when making a library for something that is going to have a web interface is to first have it work in the terminal. You can much more quickly play around with the design and fix issues there instead of having to work with a more complex web interface.
You just create a simple menu system, like
input("1: Feature A\n2: Feature B\n>")and just start trying out all of the different scenarios and workflows.Due to work environment and me not switching yet (I won’t go to W11,but switching requires a bunch of time investment I haven’t gotten around to yet) I’m mostly working in Windows, but even them I use CLI a ton. Mostly powershell, but there are a lot of cmd commands useful in troubleshooting, and robocopy and other tools are more reliable than their gui counterparts.
CLIs are almost always magnitudes more expressive than their feeble, derivative GUIs.
Tbh the terminal is super convenient. No random UI placement. Most things follow one of several conventions so less to get used to. It’s easy to output the results of one command into another making automation obvious, no possibility for ads. It’s pretty sweet
I worked customer support for a WordPress hosting company for a while, and about 70% of all of their troubleshooting was done in terminal. I never used terminal until that job. To this day I do most of my management the same way
