because every additional layer of abstraction disrupts communication with the Machine Spirit even further

Command line is a lot more powerful for a lot of cases. Most CLI programs are written with the idea that the caller might be another program, so they tend to be easy to chain with pipes and redirection. So you have tons of simple tools that you can combine however you need.

I wanted to see what all this talk about vim was and now I’ve been stuck for 3 years.

The terminal is a power tool. I can do stuff with it that’s slow or inconvenient with graphical tools.

I really like the piping capabilities of the Linux terminal. Incredibly useful for text processing.

For tasks that I know, I’m faster in the terminal. For tasks where I’m less familiar or that are very important (like disk partitioning) I prefer a GUI because with a GUI I can usually see a bit better what I’m doing.

Terminal tasks for me include copying stuff, setting folder permissions, uncompressing or compressing folders, quick edits in vim, etc.

Reproducable actions that do exactly what you expect.

many times it’s faster to do stuff in terminal than in gui

Terminal is faster when you’re used to it and sometimes offer more customization options to some apps that has both a GUI and TUI/CLI version.

I use the terminal (st with zsh and tmux) for:

• file management (advcpmv, fd, trash-cli, fzf …)
• emails (neomutt)
• text editing/coding (neovim)
• project management (taskjuggler)
• image viewing/organization (ucolla,ge)
• online video browsing (ytfzf)
• calendar (khal)
• ssh
• vpn
• news aggregator (newsboat)
• web, bookmarks manager (buku)
• passwords manager (pass)
• dotfiles manager (stow)
• not in the terminal but I also have a lot of scripts used in rofi to control my audio input/outputs, launch a web search, access my bookmarks, autocomplete username and password fields

I’m sure I’m missing some obvious tools I use daily. It’s hard remember everything when it becomes so natural.

I have shared my experience with some of these tools here.

Because it just works. No bullshit. No bloat. Just fast and efficient.

I’m just faster in the terminal than a gui

1. It feels great
2. Terminal programs run on a potato
3. They are almost always way more powerful then their GUI counterparts
4. They integrate with scripts and other tools for unlimited power and flexibility!
5. You feel like a hacker man
6. Your IT literate friends think you are cool
7. You can really do things your own way

So yeah I love using the terminal for almost everything

it allows easy scripting. also for frequently used commands, i can just scroll up in the history, instead if clicking the same buttons over and over

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.

To get shit done in general.

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.

Not having to go through a bunch menus to do stuff, not using the mouse, having --help for commands…

Or just for simplicity. For example, I use simple commands to manage my files: mv, cp, ls, rm, mkdir, etc.

There’s also Neovim, my preferred editor, which runs on the terminal.

I prefer to use GUI for visual things, like drawing, since that’s what it’s best at.