It's an one in all tool. I like that I can do almost everything through one program.
this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2023
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For me it's because it's much quicker and reliable for most use cases. Also the commands are roughly the same across many many of my systems (AIX, macos, and Linux distros)
Otherwise I'd have to install a gui
Because its easy to make a script that can chain together a bunch of commands for tasks i do frequently, so its only one manual step to do it.
The terminal is like a direct access to do things on the computer. A GUI is a program someone made to do a task the way he envisioned it to be done. If this task is not exactly what you need, you're out of luck.
Because its better
For style points at the office.
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.
Every time I touch the mouse i get a little more elbow pain. Tendens or whatever. The keyboard (an ergonomic one, at least) is more ergonomic.
I built a split ergonomic keyboard with a trackball on it so I never have to leave.
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I do a bit of programming. Git help is about terminal commands. There are graphical front ends but I have to learn how to use them. I use terminal also for package management for the same reasons.
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Why should i open discover, wait half a year for it to load, search for vlc, wait half a year, look if its not a flatpak, realise its a flatpak, repeat
If i could just type sudo pacman -S vlc?
Or search how to update my grub config if I could just type grub-mkconfig -o /mnt/Boot/grub/grub.cfg?
Because googling a command line works way better and faster than any other form.
For a lot of what I do, its the only way to do it.
For everything else, there's MasterCard.
a terminal is the ultimate gui for a lot of things especially w/ ncurses mouse support. You can open N terms and easily compose a dashboard which is exactly tailored to what you're doing at the moment. A simple oneliner often solves a problem for which a gui simply does not exist / isn't powerful enough. Terminal is the ultimate gui ftw from the space yay!
Because I can do things in 30 seconds what two windows admins take 15 minutes to do with their point and clicking. Not even making this up, this happened.
I don't use it very often because my memory is for shit so I need gui options to be right in front of me.
If you use it often that stops being a problem. You remember command names like they're your friends.
history | grep *
In Bash, Ctrl+r is super handy too.
I'm a software developer. I think about my interactions with computers as language. And Posix shell is a pretty good programming language.
So interacting with the computer this way just makes sense to my monkey brain.
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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
Terminal still has use-cases imo:
- Some programs only offer CLI, no GUI,
to use them, the terminal is the only way. - Sometimes it's faster to use CLI instead of GUI, especially when you can use your command history to re-execute.
- Testing single lines of scripts while writing them.
You can easily pipeline simple things to do more complex things. That's the point of written language.
Repeatibility (is that a word?) and scriptability. I find CLI tools easier to work with and easier to get information from them.
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.
Because my first deep dive into Linux was a server I built that I didn't install a desktop environment on.
One could ask in return "why do you use a mouse". The answer is probably "I've always done it this way" and not "after trying out different methods it's the one that i prefer".
You can use the terminal commands to automate tasks, build cicd etc. Navigating file tree and performing tasks is much quicker once you get the hang of it. Lastly it translates well on all distros and even on Mac, or windows with wsl or cygwin
For me it's because I get a lot of feedback, if anything I do goes wrong I know why. Also it's usually faster
many programs don't offer a gui so I'm forced to use it.
It just works
Can get much more done rather than navigating desktop and gui's.. Also I'm a sucker for tui's,
Ranger,
Rtorrent-ps,
Nvtop,
Gotop,
Gomuks,
Even greetd tui implementation,
And much more.