Life is too short for terminal
Life is terminal
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Ctrl+Alt+F1-F12
Super + T == fish terminal;
Super + Return == zsh terminal
Dang, I haven’t opened my terminal with keyboard shortcuts in years.
I just click the start menu and have a shortcut there.
i never understood why people use different shells. i’ve tried them all but never have the need to swap back and forth especially not during the same day with the same workflow
fr, once you get used to the terminal you never leave it
I got used to it and only use it when I absolutely have to.
I spend more time finding the right buttons to push than creating a command to do it for me.
Yes, the answer to how do I create a new user and new groups should not be well, what distro and window manager are you using?
Why not?
For the most part of the CLI methods are unified. If they’re not exactly the same they are very very close from distro to distro.
But the GUI method to add users and groups is all over the place.
I need to do a simple action in Windows, one search, The control has been there for several versions of Windows not necessarily unchanged but definitely in the same general location.
OSX same deal you need to add users groups modify network it’s all been the same place for ages.
Now someone’s trying out Linux, Where’s my network configuration, where’s my user configuration, where’s my group configuration. When the answer to that becomes well what distro, what window manager, we turn away a lot of neophites.
That’s just an inherent consequence of open source, people can make multiple versions of the same thing, and you can’t force distro maintainers to ship all the same tools. It’s not worth complaining about, and beginners need this explained to them that with choice, comes… well, choice.
CTRL+ALT+T NAH Mod+Enter is the best
I can’t say I love the terminal, if there’s a GUI for a task I’ll use that but there comes a time in every troubleshooting session where the terminal is just the only way to do something reliably.
I’m not going to lie though, I forget commands constantly so have to search the most basic shit to type in.
The trick is to build a massive history file and let auto complete use it for parts.
I think only some shells support that.
It is a nice feature, though.
Ash is the only one I’m aware of, but that’s primarily going to be found and used on stuff like routers or other embedded devices. Any modern shell can support history. That said, many users will disable it or wipe it on logout for security reasons.
It’s not just history support. It will provide autocomplete suggestions based on what you’ve already typed and allow you to browse the history of a specific query.
Zsh is the only shell I’ve used that supports it, using Manjaro.
My Ubuntu 22.04 server using Bash does not. It only supports the basic history that I think you are referring to where you can just browse the history of all your commands at once.
Congratulations, you’re human.
The window manager is just to fit a load of xterms on the desktop. (12 on my 1st desktop)
I use personally use tmux for this.
With a 24" QHD screen, text mode would be a tad weird.
Wait, I thought the terminal/shell was the modern UI…
UI file manager is bloat. Mouse is bloat.
Why have many input device when few device do?
Kids these days are too soft with their avocado toast and their graphical user interfaces
Linux Kevin
found the vi(f)m user
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
I don’t think I’ve ever used grep outside of a CLI.
Surely you’ve used something roughly equivalent like searching a text, be it web page or other document, for a word or filtering a spreadsheet?
How would one use grep for a webpage in a browser? Does the page need to be accessed outside the browser?
You should be able to use curl to get the HTML and then pipe it to grep.
Emacs grep lets you run grep, and formats the results in a buffer from where you can then easily visit the files at the match location.
A GUI makes simple things simple.
A shell makes hard things possible.
A CLI makes simple things easy to implement.
Me fucking with hard drives/partitions : GUI please
Me doing pretty much anything else - Terminal
Really you never organoze gigs of photos? That a gui task
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I have a GUI file manager that I never use but I got it because I know at some point I’m going to want to be able to see thumbnails of images.
Not much of a picture guy personally but I see your point.
Edit: I have spent a decent amount of time organizing books and comic books and that was a pretty even split between GUI and Terminal. GUI to get them in a state that I could bulk rename/move into appropriate directory with the Terminal. I assume it would be similar with pictures.
I spent last winter ripping all my DVDs, and I did a lot of the organizing, changing file names etc. in the terminal. Because I could automate the process even a little.
When doing TV shows, I could take the names of episodes from an online database, put those in a text file, use block edit mode and macros in Vim to format them the way I want, then use a bash command to iterate over the lines in a file and rename them all. Hell I’d probably still be at it if I had to rename that many files manually, even using copy/paste.
I always install gparted in the live environment 😂… cuz… yeah, I can fuck things up and end up without my data 😂.
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?
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.
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.
Agreed 👍.
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So true!!!
That’s just not true. Not without lots of hand waving.
In my terminal I can, and pretty much hourly do, combine many programs in chains of input and output to perform specific tasks and get information I need. And that’s how these programs are designed to be used. The programmer builds it to do specific things and then the user can combine the program with others in novel and nearly endless ways.
With a GUI, sometimes that’s possible between two programs if you can copy/paste between them but it’s much less reusable and a lot more tedious. But usually it’s just not possible because they’re designed for specific user personas and not as general purpose tools that may be part of a script.
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Generally I would agree that anything can be made with a GUI with enough investment. But the point where diminishing returns don’t give enough return on GUI investment are reached much sooner than a scriptable shell environment where a power user can extend it in ways that would only make sense for that power user or a very small number of users.
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Most programmers are bad at UX but not nearly as bad as GUI designers are at understanding abstraction.
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Most programmers are bad at both lol.
How would you implement piping in GUI?
Could you show us an example program with a GUI you created for this?
This right here, you can gui a single program, but with pipes we can chain nearly infinite programs. No way can you make a gui that is that flexible, I refuse to believe until I see it
To play the opposite team a bit here, I like the idea Android uses of Intents for something like this. I think it falls apart a bit in reality because app companies kinda want you in their garden and so don’t often do the work to keep things interoperable. That and the use cases from users on phones don’t frequently involve cross app functionality. But the ability is powerful for apps to say “my app needs a user photo” or one of my faves “my app needs a pgp provider (for the password store app)” and then let the other app do that piece of functionality as determined by the OS, which tracks a lot of those providers and lets the user decide which to use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automator_(macOS), or in general, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_programming_language
'Course, there’s a reason those things basically never catch on, which is that they don’t actually reduce the inherent difficulty of figuring out the algorithm, and for anything non-trivial messing with a whole bunch of drop-down lists and shit is more cumbersome than just typing the damn thing.
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Wow, you created this program for creating shaders visually? That’s impressive! You mind sharing the source code?
Things like that have been around for a long time. It was like two decades ago that I saw this shader scheme in softimage|xsi.
For implementing something like that, each node in that graph would have an array of inputs and outputs. Each of those would have a type like vector, scalar, colour, string. Then you only allow connections if the inputs and outputs match types (though you can also have conversion nodes or selectors that say pick the red channel of a colour to turn it into a scalar). Each input can be set to a constant value instead of connecting something else to it. Outputs don’t need to be connected, which is mostly useful if a node has multiple outputs. Then each node has an evaluation function that takes all input parameters and maybe internal configuration parameters (though you might as well make everything an input param since there’s no real functional difference) and uses them to calculate the outputs, which it then sends on to anything connected to those.
I’m not much of a UI guy but displaying it for the GUI would just involve drawing boxes or some shape for the node, then spaces for each of the inputs on the left side and outputs on the right side maybe colour code them by type, and lines running along the connections. Then just add the name and/or other visual information you want to display and positional information to let users move it around their work area.
Yeah, and doing this would take significantly longer to use every time than typing up a chain of commands in a terminal.
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Linux users: Non tech savvy people? Yuck
Also Linux users: Everyone should be running Linux instead of Windows!
Put those two statements together and the logical conclusion is that Linux users simply want everybody to be tech-savvy (although I’d use a different term: computer-literate). What’s wrong with that?
Nobody capable of defining an algorithm in a visual flowchart like that isn’t also capable of doing it in a CLI (or at least, in text in general – writing a script). It’s thinking through what you want to happen that’s the hard part; expressing it in the UI is trivial in comparison.
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They tried to replace programming languages with drag-and-drop toolkits too. It can be done, but sometimes there’s a reason we don’t do it.
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I would assert that basically every shell I’m aware of is also a programming/scripting langauge, able to handle things like loops and branches. This is possible to do in a GUI but it’s kind of telling no one has achieved this in a desktop environment to any significant degree, including in the Linux space.
“Iterate over all of the files in this folder, if it’s a video file of any format, create a folder with the same name as the video file in ~/Videos and move the file there.” I’m unaware of an OS desktop environment that can do even that level of automation with default GUI tools. It’s like 5 lines of Bash including “done;” at the end. You can probably do it in PowerShell, but I bet Windows power users would rather use AutoHotKey for this.
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It wouldn’t make sense to add clutter to a GUI that benefits a tiny fraction of users a tiny fraction of the time while making the experience worse for everyone else.
I can imagine making a GUI that does it. But most aren’t able to. “That could include a check option of…” yeah it doesn’t though, is my point. GUIs are for doing things manually.
You can have your GUI do anything a terminal can I guess, but you’d need a few million buttons on that gui where the programmer has anticipated each and every combination of CLI command that you are going to use, encoded that to a button or menu, included text entry boxes for each variable and have bundled every program, application and dependency that has ever existed. Totally possible.
Ctrl+Alt+F1
As a Linux user of 5 years, I like doing things with the GUI first, and then falling back to terminal if/when shit fucks up. It’s such a great tool.
As a Linux user of 10 years, sometimes I don’t touch the terminal for months, sometimes I use it every day, depends on what I’m doing. I haven’t done a lot of programming this year so I haven’t used the terminal a lot; but when playing with my microcontrollers and SBCs I use the terminal almost constantly.
One thing I will note is that I use the keyboard a lot more than I did when I daily drove Windows. I run my computer by muscle memory a lot more than I used to.
Which is funny because I’m the other way around. I’ll try doing something with the CLI but if it’s like a calculation or something and I can’t figure it out with awk, etc, I’ll defer to a spreadsheet.
I’ve bound F12 for a quake-style technical. It’s beautiful.
Yakuake. And you can make it transparent, too!
Same with Guake
Yeah, but Guake doesn’t slide down like a Quake terminal should. Maybe it sounds like a minor thing, but I think that if you’re trying to imitate a Quake terminal, it at least has to slide down from the top of the screen.
Shell is amazing for big, batch jobs or a complex thing done in one or two lines.
GUI is great for poking around at options, visualizing your files and file structure and making edits to one or two things at a time. There are a few batch tasks that work great, like the Batch Renamer in MATÉ DE. You get a preview of how your file will change before you apply it and can easily undo it if you fuck up.
I like this format. My version is:
A shell is great for things you know how to do well, or do often.
A GUI is good for things you don’t do frequently, or don’t know well.
The thing that keeps me choosing terminal tooling, though, is the ability to script. Everything a GUI can do, a CLI tool could. The inverse is not true. And many of the advantages of GUIs can be provided by a curses interface, so I find it just easier to stay in a terminal most of the time.
