Hardcore terminal users; tell us why you are at home in the command line

[original_jamingrit]

Originally Posted by glossywhite Hiya Would you mind explaining to me a little bit more about emacs?

One of the best ways to learn emacs is the built-in tutorial, but it's pretty wordy so I would also reccommend printing of a cheatsheet:

https://ccrma.stanford.edu/guides/pa...acs/emacs.html <-- one of many that you can search for on the web.

[tcoffeep]

Originally Posted by renkinjutsu could have used fbui if you didn't want to compile X. i do a lot of my renaming in the terminal, simply because things are very cluttered, because i download and won't bother to organize my files.. All i need to do is tab like crazy, whenever i can.. and as for using GUI, there are some things that i forget how to do, but i'll still be able to poke around in the terminal and press TAB until i see something familiar

Never even saw that before. How's it run? Like I've said, I've been sticking to XP and Plan9, lately.

[kevdog]

I love vi or vim but never got the hang of emacs or latex for that matter. Now I'm curious.

BTW -- the command line is awesome. Its fast!!!

[Wiebelhaus]

I had to reinstall 9.04 because they disabled the ability to key bind to terminal , I can't surf GUI for it , I want it quicker so I can bang quicker.

[glossywhite]

Originally Posted by &#32 Greg Users of Vi (the editor of the devil ) like to say that Emacs is a perfectly good OS, it just lacks a decent text editor. If you cut off the last part, it's true. First off, Emacs is not a text editor. It's a text editor generator. If you want to learn keybinds, Google (or the tutorial) will tell you how C-a goes to the beginning of a sentence, etc. I'll tell you what I find awesome about it, though. Emacs uses buffers. Think tabs, but without the physical representation up on top of the screen. They can do different things- for instance, one might be a C file (with syntax highlighting for that), another might list the contents of a directory, another might have an interactice Lisp shell open, etc. You can also split the screen a la GNU Screen (actually the reverse is true, in GNU Screen you can split the view a la Emacs buffers). Emacs is also very customizable, and already has tons of built in features. For instance, you can run a terminal inside of an Emacs session... and then use the terminal to run Screen, and use Screen to run other programs. If you really feel like it, you can run Emacs within Emacs (not that it has any use). People write programs for it that you can add on- for instance, there's EMMS to play music, ERC for IRC use, w3m to browse the web... if you want, you never have to leave Emacs. There's also the .emacs file, where you can pass options to the program- redefine keybindings, change the look of the program, etc. Tying into that, there's Elisp, a dialect of Lisp, in which you can write full programs to extend Emacs- Emacs itself is basically written in Elisp. That's what I meant by Emacs isn't a text editor, but rather a text editor generator- say a new language comes out, in Elisp you can extend Emacs to have a mode to give syntax highlighting for that language. Emacs is like Linux in that it's what you make of it.

I had a feeling it was something very special, considering how proud RMS is of it, and how much he mentions it with such evident vigour and pride, bless him!.

Wow - I really want to thank you for taking the time to write that out for me - I am now pursuing it

[clanky]

Originally Posted by glossywhite I am always watching RMS lecture

Dude, you seriously need to get out more!

[KiwiNZ]

Originally Posted by clanky Dude, you seriously need to get out more!

Agreed , whilst it could be said the that Mr RMS has done some good , there is a host of many others doing a lot of good things , and yes even better out there. And even in the closed source world too.

Explore , learn broaden the horizons.

[glossywhite]

Originally Posted by clanky Dude, you seriously need to get out more!

Dude, you seriously need to stop judging people you haven't a single solitary clue about.

Originally Posted by KiwiNZ Agreed , whilst it could be said the that Mr RMS has done some good , there is a host of many others doing a lot of good things , and yes even better out there. And even in the closed source world too. Explore , learn broaden the horizons.

You're so right - I've never watched any TV, and haven't watched a single video apart from RMS lectures. In fact, I don't think I've *ever* even left the house since the day I was born - yeah, I need to get out more I totally agree, because this is the first and only human interaction I have ever known.

I have taken on board your advice - I have decided to walk out of my room tomorrow, to see what the landing looks like; who knows, come Tuesday, I may even venture to the end of my street!.

Joking aside, I am *very* well aware of what is going on in the IT world - I am well versed in Windows, GNU/Linux and also extremely proficient in Mac OS X. Remember - *NEVER* judge a book by its cover, because that would be an assumption, and assumptions are made by the very same narrow-minded people you accuse me of being one of... ironic.

[jwbrase]

I'm mostly a GUI user: I've never understood the appeal of CLI text editors, I generally prefer file management through the GUI, etc, but there are some things that I generally do through the command line. Pinging is one of them. I'm not sure if that counts, though, because I got used to doing it that way in Windows (which as far as I know doesn't have a GUI tool for that) and haven't stopped doing it that way even though Ubuntu has a means of doing it through the GUI. Considering all the complaining you hear about Linux's command line heaviness (and the fact that there is a grain of truth to that, though not much), the fact that Windows actually lacks a GUI interface for something Ubuntu has a GUI for is rather ironic.

There are a few other things that I use the command line for now that I'm on Linux, as well as a few rough edges to Linux that still necessitate the use of a CLI tool. One of these is killing fullscreen apps, which seem to have a much tighter hold on the screen than in Windows. You can't switch them out with alt-tab or anything similar, and you can't bring up System Monitor to kill them if they crash. I find that I have to switch out to another tty and use kill at the command line to kill them.

One thing I think would be kinda neat, though, would be a closer integration of command line and GUI functionalities. Sometimes it would be really convenient if the address bar on a file browser (or something in approximately the same place) doubled as a single-line terminal window with a dropdown box to expand it into a bigger window if needed.

[undecim]

I wouldn't call myself a "hardcore" terminal user. There are still lots of things that I prefer a GUI for, but I do know my way around the terminal.

Computers are a tool of man, and like any tool, the more experience you have with it, the better you will use it. The terminal is that final stage of experience, where you are controlling your computer directly, rather than using a tool to do what the inexperienced can't. Not only does that give you more control, but you can get it done faster.