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

  • BudgieMania@kbin.social
    611·
    9 months ago

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

  • Trent@lemmy.ml
    42·
    9 months ago

    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.

  • magic_lobster_party@kbin.social
    27·
    9 months ago

    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.

  • gerryflap@feddit.nl
    26·
    9 months ago

    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.

  • www-gem@lemmy.ml
    15·
    9 months ago

    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.

  • LainOfTheWired@lemy.lolEnglish
    15·
    9 months ago
    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

    • platypus_plumba@lemmy.world
      11·
      9 months ago

      Really depends on the task and how critical it is. I would never use gparted on the terminal, 3 clicks and I’m done in the UI, without risks.

        • helenslunch@feddit.nl
          2·
          9 months ago

          I don’t care how fast you can type, you can’t type faster than I can click.

          If the GUI takes any time to load at all, it’s garbage.

  • Victoria@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    14·
    9 months ago

    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

  • stoy@lemmy.zip
    13·
    9 months ago

    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.

    • Lmaydev@programming.dev
      7·
      9 months ago

      Yeah I use WSL a huge amount of my work.

      Azure for instance is much easier to work with in the console than the website.

      Then there’s grep!

  • pelya@lemmy.world
    174·
    9 months ago

    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.

    • tetris11@lemmy.ml
      7·
      9 months ago

      Just so you know, in emacs you can do mass rename of multiple files using dired-mode. Never use a for loop again.

    • exu@feditown.comEnglish
      5·
      9 months ago

      The Thunar bulk renamer is relatively good, but recently I wanted to name images based on the capture date. Probably very tedious without the right GUI tool, while it’s just one line using exiftool in the terminal. (I don’t know it off the top of my head)

      Similarly, I just extracted the audio only from a video using ffmpeg in like 10s.
      ffmpeg -i video.mkv -c:a copy out.mka

  • ThankYouVeryMuch@kbin.social
    121·
    9 months ago

    For me the difference between a cli and a gui is like asking someone to do something speaking in a language they can understand and doing it just by pointing at things and doing gestures. It’s enough for ordering at a restaurant, but for more complex tasks it gets ridiculous, even at a restaurant you’ll get better results if you can ask for some information and understand what the server says