Hello noobs! I’ll let you in on a secret. Pros use command line interface (CLI) both on Linux and on Windows for a lot of tasks. You know why? Because it’s easier. Be like the pros, choose the easy path, use CLI!
Also if you meet a pro they will be happy to walk you through the GUI (if available) or CLI depending on what you feel comfortable with.
I use Bash and PowerShell often, and I’m fairly proficient in both. I also use a GUI in both Linux and windows as well.
Although, I might just be insane.
Same here. I didn’t imply that we only use CLI. Simply that for a lot of tasks CLIs are easier than GUIs. And therefore the CLI aversion is something to shed. The reverse is also true for other tasks too. Windows has historically put many tasks easier achieved via CLI behind a GUI. You wouldn’t see me dead playing videos via CLI. I’d launch Plex, search and play instead. 🥲
Shells offer a significantly faster and more powerful way of running programs when you know how to use them. The “helpful” Windows user is kneecapping the noob by offering a shiny but limiting GUI. Once you get a grasp of basic command line tools, you’ll wonder why you bothered with pointing and clicking stuff.
I feel like the shell becomes much more complicated when you want to use configs. Or anything other than basic commands. At that point it becomes a pain in the ass, or tedious.
Other than that I agree. Also, GUI file managers are still superior. Sue me.
I still don’t get why people like vim. Like sure, I use it to edit config files and stuff that needs sudo permissions, but in all honesty, if I could use any gui for that, like Kate, I wouldn’t see any reason for using vim. Why do I need to relearn years how to Ctrl+ f or exiting the editor? buT iT’S FaStEr. Really? You spend how long looking up guides and cheat sheets on how to use it and it’s faster? I mean sure, use what you are comfortable with but can you really say it’s that much faster than just any text editor out there?
THANK YOU.
I spent time learning vim and using a file manager (forgot which one) but after awhile I realized it’s less frustrating just using a damn GUI. I feel like the time difference isn’t too much discernible. More than anything vim is just frustrating.
When you master the tab key and the mouse cursor in a text editor, it’s a breeze.
I’m new to Linux, and pretty new to Vim, but for me personally it works because of a couple of reasons:
(i) speed. yes, it’s faster once you spent a little bit of time getting used to it. Vim movements or motions just make so much more sense in my mind, and being able to do all of them with few keystrokes feels pretty good and saves time.
(ii) comfort / muscle memory. This kind of ties to (i), where I just feel comfortable with my hands staying roughly at the same place on the keyboard the entire time I’m editing or writing something. Jumping here and there, deleting and copy-pasting, search/search-and-replace, creating-using-erasing macros, etc; things just feel so crisp and effortless.
(iii) simplicity. It is a terminal-based text editor, and so for me it’s distraction-free. I just want to open up a text file and edit some stuff or even do some bit of writing, and I don’t really feel like opening up a GUI text editors just to edit some stuff, or even write some stuff! I use Vim to write almost everything and it feels really good.
But when it comes down to it, anything like Kate or Notepadqq or any generic text editor works just fine.
It’s like Dvorak. You can be ~5% faster once you get over the turly enormous learning curve. The problem is, for most people, that 5% does not justify the huge initial investment.
The only reason I like vim is because I’ve literally never seen a Linux installation that didn’t have vim. As a result, I know like 5 whole vim commands so I can still technically function on bare-bones installations. And even then, I only learned those 5 vim commands the first time I ran into a computer that didn’t have nano or pico
I think the only reason Windows users are afraid of terminals is that they’re not used to them. They’re not that bad. Most terminal programs have a -(-)help command that shows you what you can do as well, in case you get stuck.
No one is “afraid” of terminals. We just don’t have spare time to learn a whole new fucking language.
We just don’t have spare time to learn a whole new fucking language.
well one should always try to consider the amount of time that can be saved, the complexity that is required to establish it and the potential time required to maintain it.
related:
I do think there is another reason, which is that the Windows CMD is awful. If that’s your only reference, I understand not wanting to learn it.
Powershell is pretty interesting but I haven’t learnt much of it and it’s hard to discover commands, arguments and fields within results. All the commands have really similar generic names and cryptic mnemonics. And an annoying amount of them are text based and don’t actually interoperate with the ecosystem.
I’m more used to slinging around text with bash and the basic Linux utilities so I’m not inclined to learn more than I have to on the Windows side.
I wrote a couple hundred lines of it as part of my apprenticeship a few years ago and have occasionally needed to deal with small scripts since then.
In principle, I like the idea of static typing, as I’m a backend dev, but yeah, I don’t particularly want a script to ever become large enough where static typing truly becomes useful.
I would strongly recommend using a full-fledged programming language instead. In particular, because Microsoft somehow managed to make Powershell feel even more verbose than even C#, which is one of the most unnecessarily verbose languages out there.
Back then, it also felt quite like a web technology, where many features were only available, if you had the right version combination of Windows, Powershell and .NET installed.
And of course, the biggest strength of Bash is unattainable, which is that there’s multiple decades of people posting snippets and example commands online.
Having said all that, maybe for Ops folks, who *have* to script a Windows configuration and aren’t proficient in any proper programming languages, it is genuinely quite useful.
Terminal is great until you paste a command from an online tutorial and it doesn’t do what it is suppose to.
I wrecked my kernel and rendered wifi unusable doing this just last week!
They’re aren’t meant to work. They’re meant to make us feel pride and accomplishment.
eh, the cli is easier to use, anyway
