Terminal love

[Apolyonn]

Hey guys,

Through trekking through Ubuntu, I've noticed that many websites and such tell you to basically do everything via a terminal command. It seems like the terminal is, in many ways, the preferred "gui".

Why is this? is it that people dislike guis? or does the terminal offer something more?

[mcduck]

It's simply because it's so much easier to just give people a command they can copy&paste into a terminal and execute to do something, that it would be to type instructions how to do the same task using graphical tools. Not to mention the complexity that comes from people running different desktop environments and using different programs and different languages, which makes giving good instructions for graphical apps even harder, while the terminal commands are same for everybody.

So it's not that you are told to do everything in a terminal because it would be preferred over graphical interfaces, it's just so much easier when helping somebody in written format.

(For example I often find that to give exact instructions for some graphical application I need to get to my Linux system and open the same application and go through the steps myself, just to see what each menu, button and option is called. If I haven't got the app installed or a Linux system available I simply can't give the instructions. On the other hand I can often tell the correct terminal commands without having to use any reference.)

[beren.olvar]

I find the CLI the ultimate gui. In the traditional GUI scheme not only the programmer has to put an enormous effort making menus an such to incorporate in an usable way all the options, but also the user has to struggle to point and click menu after menu, find the correct option hidden somewhere, and repeat all over again in case of mistake.

In a CLI application you probably just needed to write something like "-u". For many of the daily life tasks a terminal app makes much more sense. That's why many applications are written in that way and incorporating a GUI frontend only when needed.

[Apolyonn]

are there any books or websites you all recommend to someone who wants to learn the terminal language? i have very superficial knowledge of it.

[SlidingHorn]

Here's a good, basic cheat sheet: http://fosswire.com/post/2007/08/unixlinux-command-cheat-sheet/

If you click the image, it will open the sheet in PDF format

[Megaptera]

Also useful:

http://www.linuxcommand.org/

[Apolyonn]

So it's not that you are told to do everything in a terminal because it would be preferred over graphical interfaces, it's just so much easier when helping somebody in written format.

This is a really good explanation, further justified by the second page of Megaptera's link. Thanks for the responses and the links, cheatsheet is posted on the wall next to my computer desk. Guess I'm used to Windows which tries to distance users as far away from their command prompt as possible.