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

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.

Reproducable actions that do exactly what you expect.

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”.

I use a lot of programs and scripts that I wrote myself and most of the time I couldn’t be bothered to make a GUI for them.

Gnome software store is absolute trash that never worked, so i had to use dnf from terminal. That’s about it.

I was learning it for remote work on servers but once I knew what to do I found it more convenient to just tell the computer what to do instead of navigating apps, menus, etc.

I slowly started doing more and more using yaquake and before i knew it I basically lived in the terminal

Why I stick with it?

It’s way more interoperable meaning I can use one tool with another if I chain them together smartly. I learn one thing and it expands what I can do with the rest.

Because Gui’s don’t show advanced options and so I know/understand exactly what is being done. (e.g. I would always use apt over mint’s package store so I could see what it did, how much time I had left, download multiple applications at once and see if the package made a random config file somewhere)

I just think it’s neat!

Cause it is faster than GUI…

Only one of the ~250 linux machines I maintain has a gui.

It is quick. it does not need to load a bunch of things and in certain tasks, I can do multiple things at once.

I also find it easier to navigate and edit files with tab to complete.

I like using the terminal because of 3 main reasons:

1. I like using my keyboard
2. I like doing multiple things in one window
3. Verbosity

I’m pretty quick with typing, but sometimes I can’t see !y mouse at first, so it’s just faster for me to type out what I want to do as long as I know the right arguments for it.

My average workflow at work as me doing frequent saml logins and going between multiple kinds of databases. It’s just easier for me to run the saml cli command and then run the SQL CLI command I need instead of messing with datagrip settings and stuff. Also I recreationally run some servers and it’s just easier to ssh into the server, make the changes I need in something like nano or the redis CLI tools and then log back out. This means I’m just plain more comfortable on the terminal in certain situations like config editing, writing posts for my gemini capsule, etc.

Sometimes when I run a GUI program I’ll get big loud silence and don’t know what to do. In that case I genuinely enjoy using the terminal and running an equivalent command with verbosity settings so I can see what it’s doing or not and can track down any errors.

On top of those reasons, I’ve been playing with RISC-V architecture lately and, while the xorg riscv64 port is admirable, I just get better performance rn by running my RISC stuff through tty.

I recognize that not everybody is going to have the same use case and workflows as me, but I’m pretty comfortable with what I’ve got 😅

Because you can’t (easily) program gui apps to automate tasks, but combining a few terminal programs to get more complex behaviour is really easy

Because it’s the most effective and powerful tool for putting the Unix philosophy into practice.