I know we all enjoy being nerds and using commands (H4ckerman). But now that everything is either a gui or web based, is there really any use to terminal commands?
For example, on windows I never used powershell or cmd hardly ever. I realize now I probably could have. But Linux just drives me to use it more, which i like anyway (because let’s be honest, it makes us feel superior)
I cant tell if you are trolling or being serious. Either way, you can take my terminal when you pry it from my cold dead hands.
Nono, im not trolling! Actually was just wanting to see people’s reasoning
Would you still love terminal if it was a worm?
I have yet to find a gui that allows me to do the equivalent of running a find command with a regex to find specific files and run a set command to search and replace a string in one go.
On Windows, there are a bunch of search programs like Everything that can probably do the search. For search and replace, most text editors like Notepad++ can do that.
IT guy here. The CLI is not something I’d expect the average computer user to use at all. However, for power users and professionals it’s a force multiplier at least, and a prerequisite often.
There are several reasons for this. Firstly, IT system and server administration, in the cloud or your own hardware, is often done via the CLI. This is because it’s not that common or convenient to hook up every server in a rack to a monitor to click on stuff. But dialling into it remotely via SSH or even a serial port to perform bootstrapping procedures, troubleshooting and even routine management tasks sometimes, is very quick , easy and reliable.
The other main reason is automation. If I buy 10 servers to power my website, they all need installing and configuring a whole bunch of software, e.g. an Apache web server, DNS, SQL, Active Directory, AV, firewall, networking, and a host of other services. Now imagine doing all of that by hand. You don’t even need to be a professional sysadmin installing server racks for a living for this to be important. Even if you run a couple desktop/servers/Raspberry Pi/NAS at home, they’ll need updating, upgrading or replacing every once in a while. Having to click your way through everything every time you need to (re)configure them gets old very quickly.
GUIs are extremely poor at providing a consistent, predictable, automatable way to do things. They force you to do mostly everything manually and be present to supervise the whole thing. With the CLI you can script out pretty much any task and let it run in the background while you go do other things. I really don’t see CLIs going anywhere anytime soon. I’d say it’s actually the opposite. PowerShell was Microsoft’s way of acknowledging this very fact years ago. The primitive Windows Batch scripting language wasn’t cutting it for anyone, especially Windows Server users who had to painstakingly configure every Win Server install they did manually through a GUI wizard.
Funny thing about Powershell is that it was controversial inside of MS when it was first created, and the inventor had to really push for it to make it into Windows. Everyone thought people wanted wizards for everything instead. There’s a great Corecursive episode about it. https://corecursive.com/building-powershell-with-jeffrey-snover/
I have to concatenate off reports for part of work duties. The GUI tools in Adobe or other PDF editors are slow.
The solution was add Linux WSL2 in Windows. And use qpdf
I can now just open the Linux terminal, type qpdf --pages File1.pdf 1-z File2.off 1-z (etc) – Outputfile.pdf
It is instantly concatenated.
And next report time its just grabbing command from history and editing file name or page numbers needed
It does. On Linux you can stick to graphical applications like you do on windows, it’s just when people get on Linux they suddenly have the interest to try more things that they didn’t try on windows. 90% of the time I’m using handbrake for videos conversions. Then there’s the 10% of the time where command line ffmpeg because the functionality of the software is often greater than everything that the graphical interface has implemented or ever plans to implement.
This applies to windows too. General users usually don’t need to go into PowerShell or a WSL shell but a lot of professional users will do so. Not just IT but people that process videos, images, a lot scientist, not just Matlab types, but people that got to do mapping stuff. You grab map files, terrain data - whatever - then you need to process it for another application. A lot of cases, good luck finding a GUI that hits your specific use case but some guy that had the same problem years ago got a one liner bash command, better chance for niche use cases in my opinion.
If you play games on Steam and you ever wanted to skip intro movies or a launcher and you Google for a solution and you get an answer that says to add something to the games launch options in Steam. That’s pretty close to what people mostly do in a terminal.
Especially when on windows freeware is so frequently adware and/or abandoned last updated for windows 7 and it’s a wildcsrd if that specific functionality that is really just ffmpeg or imagemagick in the background doing the work
Deleting a huge amount of files. You’ll come across cases windows, Mac, Linux where the animations add a ton of time to the operation compared to just rm -rf 'ing a folder. Folder with a ton of files. Terminal searching for a file can be so much faster and responsive compared to GUI file explorer
Creating graphical interfaces is of critical importance for user applications for accessibility but plenty of times it’s just way faster to do it in a terminal - same with Windows and Mac.
You can take my terminal when you can pry it from my cold, dead, hands.
Any one-liner you put together, you can re-run trivially. You can rerun it with modifications trivially. You can wrap it in a for loop that runs it with different parameters trivially. You can stick it in a file and make a reusable Bash script. It’s far easier to show someone else how you did it (just copy/paste the text of your terminal session) than dozens of screenshots of a point-and-click adventure (and not in a good way) GUI app. Bash commands are easier over SSH than GUI apps over RDP or VNC or whatever. You can’t script a GUI app.
I seriously find myself wondering why someone would you use a GUI for something you can do with a terminal? Learning curve is the only reason I can think of.
I frequently find myself creating tools that let me do with a terminal what I formerly could only do with a GUI tool.
You’ve got plenty of examples of how the command line is more than jus a “cool” way to do things. So I’ll address a couple other issues.
On windows you are discouraged to use command line because that way windows gets more control over what you can do or can’t do. Remember windows is not a neutral piece of software, it’s a company’s business model. On Linux there’s no reason to impede using the command line, all the power to you.
(because let’s be honest, it makes us feel superior)
I don’t know if it’s because of my autism, but this strike me as odd. Do people really think like this? I have a certain expertise, that’s computers, and I can use a bunch of different tools to the best of my knowledge to do things. I choose command line or GUI depending on how easy the task is to do in each or the time it takes. Not everyone is trying to show off, it’s just the best tool to use sometimes.
The meme of people feeling superior for using CLI is 30 years old. What you have from op is lazy, out-of-date humor. Like sure, there have always been and will always be a minority of people that upon learning a small bit of something will brag about it (in this case how to use a CLI), but mostly it’s just boomer humor. I wouldn’t take it seriously that there are any people of note who feel superior for using a CLI.
Ah I see, thanks for the explanation. So my autism is not to blame, I’m just out of the loop. I mean, yeah, it’s always funny when you see in a movie they put a command line tool just to make it look like someone is a R34L |-|4c|<3r and they are just doing ls and cd but never really knew it was a thing in general too.
I guess I’ve earned a woosh in the OP’s joke.
Yes, just making a joke, however when anyone sees me use Linux even for basic stuff they freak out that im hacking. So the cliche still stands strong.
Good point on windoze!
For programming it’s essential.
Could you elaborate ?
I’ve always wanted to get into coding but what ive watched/read on something like godot or VBA was all clicking certain boxes in the gui and didnt interest me much. Are you saying like python and scripts ? That makes sense. I have no clue what programmers actually do since ive never been able to find something to apply it to
I wrote a program at work that gets deployed to hundreds of thousands of systems and is very hard to fully test or instrument. This program recently had a bug that was hard to track down. Using the command line, I connected to one of these boxes over ssh and ran a series of commands to detect the bug and dump details of what happened. Then, I took all those commands and turned them into a onliner that I could pass in over ssh, so I could get everything I needed for an individual maxhine. I then used
xargsto run that command in parallel over every single one of the systems my code was running on and in the end, I was left with a nice directory of files whose name was the IP of an affected system, each filled with useful information. I started by manually running command over ssh, but the composable nature of the shell allowed me to transition that into a script in a matter of minutes.I provided a more residential example of why I exclusively use the terminal for file management in a different top level comment.
Clicking? I spend most of my time typing. Even in Labview there’s some typing to do. And godot requires a substantial amount of code to go with the gui side, it just has its own text editor.
But I mostly mod games these days, and I frequently need to understand the terminal api that’s being used to gather and use resources because the vscode gui fails to get things set up on its own a lot. I use the terminal directly less these days. But I still interact with it daily. Heck, I even use terminal args in steam game launching to improve performance occasionally.
I mostly use the terminal for automation though. And ffmpeg.
Aside from the automation, which has been mentioned already, I tend to seek out terminal based solutions and heavily use it over GUIs because:
- my wrists tend to hurt after using a mouse for too long (mouse use is now limited mostly to browsing the web and spreadsheets)
- lower resource footprint means I can do more with less hardware
It’s easier to automate.
I use the terminal because text errors are much easier to parse, research, and discuss than GUI error states.
also, it looks nicer than most GUIs, because of the great color schemes and CLI app designs that people make for us.
also I use the fish shell and emacs and I have a lot of custom scripts I’ve built over the years, so my user experience is a delight, and my automation capabilities are greater than they would be if I preferred GUI-based solutions.
For me the most important aspects of terminal commands is that (1) you are forced to learn how your OS really works and (2) the terminal will always be able to do things that your GUI isn’t programmed to do.
For example, I use brew commands to install brew packages on bazzite because there is no GUI frontend available. I also use it to start ollama LLMs on my machine even though there is a GUI frontend available, because I don’t need a frontend for two commands.
GUI: ~5 mouse buttons / wheel functions Terminal: +102 keys
Do you unplug your keyboard to use a gui or something?
In Linux, GUIs are almost always a front end with limited options for a CLI. Also, with CLI you can chain commands to get even more control.
On windows, sfc /scannow, dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth, and dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup /ResetBase are pretty much required to prevent that mess from blowing up…
I’ve also had to use the command line to do some Exchange 365 stuff like forcing immediate archive population on 100% full inboxes whose users refused to delete any emails from…
