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?
Cmd was torturous and powershell not much better.
Some things are just massively tedious to do through any gui. Sometimes the converse is true.
One reason why LLM is desired as a ui element is that you can describe what you want in text without having to remember how to navigate a bunch of convoluted ui elements. CLI is related, except more precise but more demanding on specifics of input.
Powershell is actually really good a manipulating large amounts of data and outputting it how you want, the trouble is the commands are too lengthy and convoluted to remember, so I have to check web sources. While Linux commands are simple and short.
As much as I hate to say it, powershell is actually pretty good.
https://www.nushell.sh/ ?? sort of PowerShell without Microsoft?
I’ve heard of this before but never looked into it much.
It’s certainly capable, and has a more structured pipeline structure saving you in theory from awkwardness of grep/awk sorts of ‘processing’ that may be out of whack. It also has a command model where whether you are calling cmdlets or .Net functions, it’s lighter weight than a typical bash interaciton that has to fork/exec every little thing (and the ability to invoke .Net functions means a lot of capabilities that are normally not directly available to something like bash).
However, from a user experience, it’s got a few things that can be a problem:
- It’s a bit too ‘programmer-y’, and particularly maybe a bit too perl-y. Some of the same criticisms of how perl can be a bit of a mess carry over to powershell.
- It’s ecosystem is mostly just whatever Microsoft gives to you. The *nix side of the house has had a diverse ecosystem, but Microsoft is largely on their own. Good hooks into most Microsoft products, but not a whole not of third party enablement.
- Other shells have better and/or richer UX, like fish
Depends on your work. If you manage headless remote servers or computers, terminal through SSH is kinda the only way to use the computer. There is a lot of software and algorithms or databases that don’t actually require a gui. Terminal comands are also great because they can be easily reused and further integrated and automated.
SSH in terminal and understanding the basic commands is a must for hobbyists as well, baby’s first VPS is what got me hooked.
It’s easier to automate.
Absolutely, I use PowerShell loads every single day.
Some things are easier or faster with a GUI and some things are easier or faster with a terminal.
My mate installed Linux Mint the other week. (Yay) I don’t know how Mint is different from Bazzite, or what file manager he is using, but I know enough terminal to show him how to mount his old hard drive and save some files from his windows partition.
My mate installed Linux Mint the other week. (Yay) I don’t know how Mint is different from Bazzite
Bazzite is Fedora based whereas Linux Mint is Debian based, BASH is a pretty universal language so most commands will be interchangeable however, you two have entirely different package managers so installing software will be different.
Also Bazzite is immutable so if I’m not mistaken changes to system files like
/etc/bash.bashrcwill not persist for you upon updates whereas on Linux Mint it will always remain the same regardless of updates, this may not be the greatest example because when I upgraded from Debian 12 to 13 I was asked if I wanted to keep the file the same or if I wanted to use the package maintainers version, but I think I got the idea across.Bazzite is not perfect, (I might even switch back to EndevourOS if/when I’m bored of my gaming phase) but right now, all but 1 of my steam games are launching, and my GOG games are all working first try with Heroic.
Of course, some of the best single-purpose applications are command-line tools.
FFMPEG or YT-DLP for examples.
And they have so many great GUI frontends on practically all platforms out there!
Its a window into the actual internals of the machine. I would say yes, its one of hte many ways linux sets itself way from Windows. And its VERY lightweight. Some linux distros dont need it, some do.
Heck even MacOS has a terminal app. Just because
I don’t use the terminal often (outside my job where I’m using git commands or launching code) but when I use it it’s generally for things that are almost impossible with gui. Troubleshooting network issues or boot issues or searching for files. Fuck, sometimes I can’t even get to a folder I know is on my computer without a terminal.
While this feels like bait, I’m going to take it. Yes, there is a huge benefit to learning and using a terminal if you use a computer as a tool for creating and working instead of passively consuming entertainment. Organizing and searching files of any sort, building applications, writing without distraction, working with remote devices, and just generally using your computer as a tool instead of a fancy TV are all made easier, faster and more efficient if you can use a terminal. The unix philosophy gives you the ability to do things by stringing together a few commands that you might have to find a specialized program for, if it even exists in GUI land.
That’s not to say the GUI’s aren’t great for a lot of things. They are! But they also lock you into doing things in a few predetermined ways rather than letting you develop the skills and techniques for exploring new spaces.
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
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.
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.
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.
Many things are way easier on the command line than they could ever be in a GUI. Especially for processes that need repeatability, e.g converting a whole directory of images in a certain way.
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
I fixed a family member’s Windows PC once. Stuck in an update boot loop. Had to rebuild the bootloader to fix it. It took ten minutes once I looked up the commands online. He had already taken it to a PC repair shop and they said all they could do was reinstall the operating system. Honestly, these Windows people are like handicapped because they never really interact with their computers. They only interact with a kind of software nanny that keeps them away from the scary stuff for their own good.
I love my terminal.
Yeah linux made me love computers again! Interacting more closely with the machine is so much better for me
