A gui is helpful sometimes, but there’s a lot of cases where there’s no feasible way to make a good gui that does what the terminal can do.
Right tools for the right job.
For example, a gui to move a file from one folder to another is nice - drag and drop.
A gui that finds all files in a directory with a max depth of 2 but excludes logs and runs grep and on matching files extracts the second field of every line in the file? Please just let me write a one liner in bash
A GUI makes simple things simple.
A shell makes hard things possible.
Me fucking with hard drives/partitions : GUI please
Me doing pretty much anything else - Terminal
I see a lot of people saying they have to use a GUI tool for partition management, and I’ve never understood why.
Text based tools like parted are fairly easy to use, at least compared to other terminal tools the same people are able to use for other tasks.
What is it about partitioning that needs a GUI when other tasks don’t? Is it the visual representation of the partition layout? A general fear of borking a disk?
Problem nowadays is that changing partition tables is so rare that parted changes their commands between uses, and I never remember if fdisk nowadays has all the GPT related issues that made me try parted in the first place ironed out. Plus I can’t remeber the new GPT commands and partition IDs.
I still mostly just read the help text every time because nothing else is installed - but from the speed I might be a bit faster with a well designed GUI nowadays if it is about modifying GPT disks. MBR disks I still can do with fdisk in my sleep.
Is it the visual representation of the partition layout? A general fear of borking a disk?
Yes
Being able to see it helps a lot. I can and have done it via parted. My media server doesn’t have a desktop environment installed. I just really would rather have a GUI when it’s available as an added safeguard.
I use Super+Return
I use Meta+Enter :)
I believe I may have found a compromise: ❖+⏎
I use Capslock and it is beautiful.
NOT PROPERLY YOU DON’T
UI file manager is bloat. Mouse is bloat.
Intellij: Has a modern GUI for Git with code cleanup, import optimization and visualization of changes.
Me: Open terminal, ‘git commit -m “wrote code” && git push’. Then realize I forgot to add half of the files, so I make another commit. Then realize I forgot to cleanup bad indents, so I make another commit. Then realize my code doesn’t even build, so I make another commit, etc.
Don’t forget us dyslexics though! Cli is rough on that, but gui tends to avoid the errors a typo can cause.
I swear, having to copy/paste stuff in terminal to avoid typing the damn commands five times is way less convenient.
I get it, Linux veterans love the terminal because it is efficient and capable. But there’s multiple reasons for a gui interface for common tasks, accessibility being the biggest.
Super + T in my case, but still…
(shhh 🤫, it’s actually the win key, but don’t let the Linux users hear ya 🤫)
CTRL+ALT+T NAH Mod+Enter is the best
The main reason Terminals suck is the lack of any guides.
Imagine a CLI interface without commands, just selecting. That would still work everywhere and be easy to maintain, but it would be easy to use.
Or just having cheatsheets available
cheat(){ curl cheat.sh/$1 }
That makes Terminals useful for everyone
Cheat sheets are man pages and the -help option on most commands
Those exist already