ICYMI: I wrote up a quick blog post to address "Linux supremacy" arguments that might spring forth from this discussion. :P vkc.sh/lets-talk-about-linux-supremacy/
I don't believe Linux users are superior to the users of other operating systems, but I'm firmly convinced Linux is superior to other operating systems!
Trash talking is what politicians and those wrestlers do. Coaches on the other hand, concern themselves with any areas that could be improved in the team they coach. Yes they do look at what the competition is doing right and use that to further improve their team. Often, trash talkers totally fail to see these strengths in the competition as they only focus on finding supposed faults. I am less concerned about competitors over taking linux and more concerned about forces that will work to turn linux into a mainstream OS with all those great aspects of linux that many of us love, such as the powerful command line, disappearing one day. I just bought a Pinephone, only to discover one of the OSes, had stripped away some of the USB serial terminal support. I found an open issue for it. The resolution was that the identified USB serial terminal would be re-added, but this was not a typical use case for a phone, so it was considered a one time fix. See how the focus of the developers is to turn the linux distro into one built for typical phone users. The whole point of having linux on the phone for me, was to be able to do what linux could do, on a small portable device. In my case, connect to a wide variety of microcontrollers. Currently, my Xiao nrf52840 sense works on my two Pi systems, but only the storage profile works on my Pinephone, not the serial. I gave this example just to show how easy it is for those great features in linux, to disappear while many of us are not in need of them, and may be impossible to bring back when we do one day have a use for them.
My guess is that the person in question havent worked with infrastructure, but only software development in an IDE? :D I have heard the exact same argument for likewise people. After 4 years of working full time on linux environments, albeit being forced to run ssh through a Window(s), I just completed the first part of a linux sysadmin cert.
@@WillKemp To an extent that may have had some validity 20 years ago do to survivorship bias, these days, modern Linux distros are at least as easy to use as Windows is.
There is one thing that I feel that you missed mentioning. That is command-line tools and how they can work together using piping (i.e. the '|' character). And that is something that GUI programs can not do. And it is also part of the whole Unix ethos.
I thought about expanding the whole "bash scripting" section of this video after I recorded it, but in the end I left it short and off-the-cuff. But absolutely, pipes and stdin/stdout are all extremely important elements that folks should learn!!
@@mainStream-user Not quite! MS-DOS has had piping and file redirection since version 2.0 from 1983. It was based on UNIX pipes/redir. Around this time Microsoft was working on Xenix, their own UNIX variant. Subsequent versions of OS/2 and Windows NT copied how DOS pipes worked to retain compatibility.
Pipes are uncommon with GUI apps but not impossible. Some Linux/BSD GUI editors like gedit and gvim will accept text from stdin, eg. uname -a | gedit - Many Linux/BSD apps will spit out various debugging info to stdout or stderr if you run them from the terminal. Technically this is possible in Windows GUI apps too using AttachConsole(), but it's a bit of an odd hack.
Keep in mind that there are only 5 places on a monitor that you can hit with a mouse without looking. The 4 corners and wherever the mouse is already located. With a keyboard, you've got 9 without even moving any fingers.
The knowing how to use the command line is like knowing magic. It takes effort to learn, if you accidentally use the wrong words things can get weird, and it's incredibly powerful.
Speaking as a man who started working on storage devices with a CDC 16 million word drive (the type with 5 platters), I used a terminal of some kind since the very beginning. Not being able to use a terminal is like having to use a calculator because you can't add numbers on paper. A person needs to know just want they are TRULY doing when they drag and drop. The terminal isn't just a way to do things, it's a way to understand things. BTW.... I think your approach to explaining things is about the best on youtube. Clear and concise.
I did not realize there are Linux users who do not use the terminal. All the terminal tools are what make Linux so powerful. Thank you for educating me on the existence of these strange non-terminal creatures.
I’d actually like to see more graphical applications offer a terminal interface. Basically let you run a terminal version of the graphical app. It would make it easier to automate some tasks but still let you use the graphical interface when you feel like it. There’s a certain kind of enjoyment I get from using graphical applications and a different kind of enjoyment I get from using terminal based applications. I wouldn’t want to see either one disappear.
IMHO, the best GUI applications are basically just interfaces for commandline programs that simply put the necessary command together for you, so that you're not dealing with a super long command to type out, but can if you want to, or choose to save it for use again. Handbrake is kind of nice because it allows you to export the settings for use in the terminal or just use again in the future. That's super nice for things like TV series where you might not want to waste the space of storing the episode on your computer when you aren't planning on watching it again for another year and can just quickly tell it to do the conversion again while you do other things without reconfiguring things.
I learnt Linux in school. Focus was terminal, we only explored the different GUI options briefly. Today, 20 years later, the Linux machines I use nowadays are all headless and I use Mac as my desktop daily driver. Still use the terminal extensively. And you know what? Nano works splendidly on my Mac.
The thing I particularly appreciate about the terminal is the ability to do things "unattended" - whether it's background jobs, scheduled jobs (cron) or long-running commands where I might not stay connected to the machine in question. Which leads me to my love for terminal multiplexers, tmux or GNU screen.
IMHO, automation, is arguably the biggest advantage of the CLI. You can automate just about anything that has a CLI option with any language that you want to use, although Bash and PowerShell are probably the most popular choices due to just being on a bunch of computers already.
Five years down my Linux road, the terminal and I still have a slightly strained relationship, witch is absurd since I started out with a Arch install with no prevous knowledge (Yes, Im an idiot), but I'm using it moore and more; it is a fantastic tool... and so am I. I actually just wanted to say thanks for your videos, I truly enjoy them.
I think the thing that makes GUIs user-friendly is that they are discoverable. One can see many functions an application provides just by looking at the screen. The advantage of terminal apps is that most of the time (even non-power users) do not need the discoverability: they know exactly what they want. When going through the filesystem, I often know the top few directories, I do not need to discover them, so I can use `cd`. Sometimes I mix the two: I will go to the project folder with cd (because I know the path) but then `xdg-open` to discover the parts I am not familiar with. The discoverability can even be overwhelming sometimes. There was a mock-up named "If OpenSSL were a GUI" that showed what OpenSSL would look like if it was a GUI tool with all the options and it was massive. With CLI apps, one can easily ignore the parts that are not relevant for them. GUI apps need to either become very complicated to support all the options a CLI app offers, or give up the less popular functionality to keep the application manageable (which is not a bad thing).
Indeed, command line is extremely easy to document, and is extremely searchable. Most of us can search the web for exactly the task we have in mind. (Or dear I say, know how to use the command's own help functionality and man pages) Honestly for a GUI to do the same functionality it has to become a crazy maze which is helpful to no one. (It's possible to make use of better design for better GUI, but it would require far more resources than most teams have). There is a reason why when being asked for help linux guru's like to just paste a command that will solve the problem, as oppose to making a huge document with screenshots.
@@joshuapettus6973 The thing that drives me bonkers about manpages and help is that they are far too often devoid of any practical information. I've been using Imagemagick to "compress" images (convert PNGs to smaller JPGs or GIFs) and do some cropping, but the manpage for Imagemagick is useless and convert's manpage is only slightly better. You are REQUIRED to go online to get working, usable help. 'man convert' yields: -crop geometry cut out a rectangular region of the image Searching online gives me an actual useful command: convert -crop 640x480+200+100 image.png image.jpg will convert the image to a jpg and crop a 640x480 region of the png 100 pixels down and 200 pixels right from the top left corner of the png.
That used to be the case, but it's been getting worse over the last 10-20 years. The commandline is plenty discoverable and all tools have some way of printing out every possible commandline argument. The hard part of the commandline is creatively thinking about how to combine different commands to do things.
Even if I recommend ways that does not include terminal for newcomers, I always find myself in terminal for even simple stuff. I think eventually everyone who passes the basic learning curve will use the terminal.
If the only things you use in the terminal are htop and some simple text editor, you are acceptable to me. In my opinion, avoiding those two is literally harder and less user friendly.
@@MrBearyMcBearface The usual way people come to appreciate the terminal these days is starting with things like that and seeing the cool stuff that can be incrementally added.
This is not a practical answer, but for me the terminal is a nostalgic thing. I learned computers back in the 80s using DOS. I remember having thick books with instructions and learning that I can just type commands in and get whole programs to do things for me. It felt like wizardry to my child mind. Using the terminal in linux still kinda feels that way now.
I remember upgrading from DOS 5 to 6.22. I got the full retail IBM box edition with all the floppy disks and 3 ring binders. Perhaps like you that is why I also love terminals. I also was introduced to Linux in the late 90's on Slackware and learned to compile my own kernels and would take advantage of multiple terminals.
@@Wandering_Horse DOS 6.22 with the "move" command. I remember that one that was big time! My first distro was Debian 2 in the late 90's for a CS course. I should have used Slackware. I feel like the dependency hell of dpkg at the time was more than I should have taken on with a 33.6 kbps modem.
@@Brian-qv1ir Haha, I had forgot about the hellscape of never ending dependencies! New users dont get to experience that forgone era of pain. I remember asking my mentor a question and his response was almost always 'it depends', I hated that answer. Then there was asking the email user groups for help, boy you had better have read the man page and did your research first otherwise you would get scolded with the dreaded 'RTFM!'. (Admittedly, in doing so you would most likely find the answer) So happy linux has largely moved past those dark days. New users today have no idea how much easier and mainstream Linux is nowadays. Cheers!
I love your enthusiasm for what you do Veronica, and I appreciate learning more through your channel. You and I are of similar vintage, but I didn't have much access to computers in the DOS or Amiga days. As such, the first system I could really get my hands on to learn on my own schedule was a windows 95 Pentium 133. I feel like learning computers via command line vs GUI is the difference between learning carpentry and going to IKEA. Command line is still not home for me, but I work on learning and understanding more.
CLI (terminal) is the manual transmission of operating system. When you use it you are closer to your machine. When I use Windows on my laptop, I have always a ssh session opened on Windows terminal, connected to my linux desktop and I feels home. I can be in an other city and it still works.
To an extent that's the sort of environment that the commandline was originally intended for. Early on, most people didn't have direct access to the computer, so much of it would be over a dumb terminal to the mainframe.
🎉🎉🎉 YES YES YES to Celebrating the Terminal!! 🎉 🎉🎉 For all the reasons you stated and more! Having a standardized box full of familiar, simple, reliable, interoperable, consistent, and proven tools is where the REAL power of the User is realized.
Your second last point is exactly why i love the terminal. I use it to chain basic (or hard to remember) commands for doing my daily things into a shell script which the rest of my team can then use (build jobs, testing, etc) some of which are significantly harder to do in a gui-based app and becomes a one line command to remember vs 100 steps
I couldn't hve said it better myself! You have a gift for explaing Linux related concepts in a simple way - so *anyone* can understand! I wish you'd post videos more often... YOU'RE AWSOME!
2 years later, and yes, I love using the terminal, and when i use it, it makes me feel the computer is actually listening to me, unlike when you press a gui button and nothing happens. When nothing happens in a terminal command, you know you typed it wrong.
In fact, I had the vision that our carsharing provider would offer a terminal application to book their cars, I often don't like these fancy graphical interfaces when they're not really fast and well made, and that is very often the case, so... I remember to partition my harddrive via terminal commands because of having all features without using external tools. Very efficient!
I have been using Linux since March 93 and as a totally blind user I find the terminal efficient, easy to use and it lets me do a lot of the heavy lifting tasks that would be difficult in the GUI. I do use Windows and the NVDA screen reader as too many emails contain attachments that are not easily viewable in the terminal and sound editing is easier in the GUI, never got the hang of Ecasound. I use the shell in windows as well, never really made friends with the mac although the last one I had was back in 2007, the terminal was nice though.
@@encycl07pedia- I use lynx at a console but rarely surf the web with Linux, I use it for my servers mostly. If I were surfing web on the desktop most things require Java-script so I would use Firefox/Iceweasel. W3m also isn't bad under Emacs I am told
I appreciate this very much. Lately I've had the urge to learn the terminal for efficiency's sake and I LOVE Efficiency as I struggle with it on the day-to-day with ADHD. If I had the terminal to organize my cupboards that'd be epic :D When I introduce someone to Linux, I like to tell them about the terminal and that 'It's fun, there's so much you can do and makes you feel like a pro even if it's something simple through a few lines on the screen"
Great video as always! I've been using Linux (and the terminal) for about 2 years now and I love every aspect of it, even though I know I still have a lot to learn, it's an awesome tool.
I love the Terminal too, it's awesome how fast shit goes in the Terminal and I love to use it when I need something specific, but going Terminal only is something I don't want to do but who knows, maybe I become a Terminal Wizard too some day. Blessed be the sacred Terminal.
I'm here for the C64, not really but what a lovely machine. Great video, I like the analogy of using a power tool versus regular screwdriver, it certainly is how it feels sometimes using a GUI based app.
Nice video Veronica. I would add two advantages 1) on the terminal, programs can easily "talk" using pipes and redirection, thus combining small tools to do big things! 2) with the teeminal, is much easier explaining to someone else how to exactky do something. This much harder with graphical tools! (A consequence of the standarization!).
On the topic of shell scripting, it also bears mentioning how powerful `make` is. If your objective is to consume files, process them, and emit other files, `make` is the ultra-terminal to automate that procedure by firing shell commands for you, getting you fast turns on your project as you improve your process. There is no equivalent to make in a GUI all because it all starts with the terminal.
Veronica thank you for this video! I’m not the only one that loves the terminal. It’s just so Linux-y!!! I have a video idea: as a former COBOL systems analyst/programmer I think it would be awesome for you to do a COBOL video since there are tons of legacy systems out there on mature hardware using COBOL and we could use more people interested in learning the language. Thanks!
I've thought quite a bit about it! I have algorithm-related concerns about diving into COBOL discussions, but I might dip my toe in the water with a "how to try COBOL with Gnucobol" at some point down the road. If it doesn't completely tank, I could imagine doing a few more practical examples. (Exploring IBM stuff would also be important!) We need more COBOL devs!
Bravo! Your video is an excellent defense of the terminal. I used CP/M and AppleDOS at first, then DOS, Windows, and OS/2, then Linux, and used the command line interface in all those systems. I enjoy the prettiness of a GUI, but in every system I have used, the command line is usually the faster and simpler way to get admin stuff and file management done. Thanks! 😀
One of the best things about the terminal is that you can (usually) change how a particular command or program works with a dash and a letter or combination of letters. No need to muck around in menus and settings to find that one thing you need to change. Just add a letter. Don't know the letters? Man it.
Awesome video! I agree, the "terminal" is more "muscle memory doing something and not thinking about it" vs. the "graphical" "find the stupid cursor (stupid Windows(R)), place it where it's needed, and do something", lots of hand-eye-mouse-monitor-desk coordinating. Btw... Please, please, please do a playlist of terminal only apps to complete day to day tasks. I'd be interested in knowing what's good and what's not out there for everyday office things like word processing (not text-only like the cult of Vim and church of Emacs), spreadsheeting, web browsing, and email. You can even do everything via a dot-matrix printer, turn it into a soundtrack to accompany the bop it!
I’m new at Linux. I figured if you use the software stores everything will be sweet. The lesson, when all else fails, the TERMINAL, will save you. It ain’t that hard
#An ode to the Terminal > 'Stuck in front of the window, you feel a void That Triggers You' > 'But if you dare cross that window, you'll see yourself type Thanks To You' #Terminal is love, terminal is life
I really enjoy when you do these more unscripted videos. While your scripted stuff is often funny, quirky and so very original, sometimes it's nice seeing something less produced. I mean you have one of the highest production value Linux/Technology themed channels out there, which often falls into more of a "neck beard" esthetic. I can really see how much work you put into these videos and how emphatic you are about the subject matter. Keep up the great work... Oh and great points about the terminal, although I am sure you're mostly preaching to the choir. I find TUIs to be a happy middle ground for some things.
Part of the reason I learned vim was to force myself to live in the terminal. Next thing you know, my friend showed me tmux and I wanted to learn how to use it. Now I have a workflow involving the terminal and kept learning tricks or finding useful tools that sped up my productivity. I think that’s the thing, learn the basics and then you can pick up new tricks or commands based on the work you do
Thank you Veronica for the good serious work you put into your blogs. I would love to get more about terminal work if you please. As I understand it, knowing how to use the terminal is knowing how to use Linux. Thanks again and all the best.
It helps if you have used MS-DOS (or similar) in the past, then the concept of a terminal is not completely strange or foreign to you. In university we used the terminal extensively and almost exclusively, we even had a mandatory course all about using the text based linux utilities in the terminal and learning to script using bash. It's very useful! When my professor (who happens to be the author of TextCat) wanted to send me an e-mail, I expected him to open his mail client (GUI) or perhaps open the web-based client. Instead he opened a terminal, typed a few lines and the e-mail was on its way! And why not, it saves a lot of time this way.
Yes, although the DOS commandline was a lot less fully-featured as it needed to run on computers with far fewer resources than the ones that Unix was designed for. DOS was expanded over the years as new versions came out with newer computers being available, but it was never as powerful as the OSes that started out in academic institutions.
I'm still an intern in the Linux world, but still totally agree with you. The "outsiders" (haters) think it's just some magic tricky-like from the Linux user to try looking like a hacker or something, but the truth is far away from this. I'm literally using the ssh just for keeping up to date my PCs at home sometimes from my phone. At my job, I'm working in different environments sometimes, and I also experience the blessing of standardization immediately when I'm able to get any terminal (oh what am I say... it's SHELL! :) ). Difficult to learn? Yes, I'm still just a google searcher script kid. But it's/will be beneficial? Freakin' YES!
Hi Veronica! I definitely agree with all your arguments. You can add another argument: it's easier to assist on the phone or with text chat with command line tools. With a graphical app, you have to remember the interface, where to click, etc.
I agree! I use the terminal everyday! I manage a series of Linux servers without a GUI. The applicaiton is terminal based as well. TMUX became my standard tool once I learned how to customize it. On my work Windoze PC I use WSL and just started to use MULTIPASS from ubuntu w/HyperV backend. I find it faster than WSL and easier to customize memory, cores and disk sizes on the fly. Thanks for the video. Long live the terminal!!
In 20 years of using linux I have never used a gui on my systems. CLI is all I’ve ever needed and coming from Apple //e through to Unix and dos it just makes more sense to me. I still use my //e as a terminal for my linux boxes
I know this is an older video but I do think the terminal has it's place, as well as being an important piece of the Linux experience onion. Personally, I don't use it a lot but there's an increasing number of commands/tools I do find myself reaching for. Love the deployment idea though. I may not be deploying servers but another part of the Linux experience is distro hopping. The idea of a folder with a bunch of configs to quickly make your new home fell like home sounds great. Might need to look at moving towards more terminal/text config file friendly applications!
Great video. A big advantage with the terminal is the ability to easily repeat commands, whether that's by scrolling backwards through your command history to find a command you've used before, or running a shell script you've written with a list of commands you want to run in a particular order. sh/bash/zsh scripts can be surprisingly powerful too - often good enough that you don't need to resort to using something like Python to do certain tasks. Your hypothetical example at 7:30 of renaming 700 files at once can actually be replicated in the GUI in recent versions of MacOS reasonably well. Finder's (batch) Rename allows you to replace, prepend/append or number text within filenames. It's something I really wish Ubuntu's Nemo file manager did, though using "thunar --bulk-rename" seems to fill the void there. The advantage of doing this over using a bash script is that you get a preview of the destination filenames before actually performing the rename, making it a lot less dangerous to use. Though you could probably write a bash script to work the same way if you needed to. In any case often times (particularly when connected to a remote server) I will use the nnn file manager in the terminal to do batch renaming, which uses a text editor to edit the list of destination filenames. nnn is one of my favourite new tools, and will run basically anywhere you can get a shell prompt.
On the other day a friend of mine that always use GUI-based programs on a Mac to do his job asked me how to squash a series of commits. He was unable to do it properly. Then I grabbed three lines of git commands that I have saved in my text files because I often forgot all the commands and just send it back to him. And it's done. Terminal-based applications will be almost universal across different OSes. You will reduce the amount of work on how to do things. Same applies with Terraform for example: The way I can create a loop on how to create a 'for_each' loop to create Subnets for each Availability Zone of a Region will work almost in the same way if I am using AWS, Azure, GCP, or Oracle. I don't need to login to each service provider to know WHERE to look at in order to create this. Each interface will be different. On Terraform, I just have to take a look what parameters I need to pass on. It's quite straighforward.
I certainly agree. As someone who has utilized and used dual-booting of various Linux distros alongside Windows over the years, at first the terminal seemed just a headache to work around. However, when I finally made myself work at it, it was then that I understood what, at least for me, was a big part of the Linux appeal. I knew DOS/command prompt, at least commonly used commands, but now I find myself less discontented with Windows 10 in recent years, and use Windows Powershell way more. Plus, the feel of using old-school, keyed-command-driven computing again sure is nice. Early on, GUIs started dumbing us down, the introduction of the mouse, touchscreens, spellcheck, and autocomplete got us docile, lazy, and tenderized for algorithmic manipulation, smartphones, data mining, the crypto scam, etc. Disconnect (from skynet and get back to the internet), sit back, plug in, and go a typing, scripting, etc. I say. :)
I learn to love the terminal. I'm from windows and converted my machine to Linux. I sometimes finding software here that if there is a CLI version of it, then that's I'm gonna use. It sometimes feel nostalgic for me the first time I met DOS mode.
Your comment about using the terminal gives you a better understanding of how the computer works, same with a car, you don't have to know how a car works to be a good driver but it may help you to remedy some issues.
Tab-completion and wildcards should be mentioned, too. These make the terminal waaaaay faster than using file explorers and are being used in nearly every command you type.
Syntax = pages and pages of graphical options and widgets. This can be hard, like with regular expressions, but worth it when one can then express intent with crazy fast and high level precision. The command line offers syntax to compete with drag and drop. Worth your time.
The primary Linux distribution I use is Linux Mint, and while it includes a good GUI for updating the system and installing software, sometimes I still use the terminal because it's faster! It's very good that those GUIs exist for newer users, but I'm glad I learned the terminal, at least to a basic degree.
I teach a general introductory programming course (using Java) at my local university. Of course, we keep things as simple & straight-forward for students, so we have a nice & comfortable graphical IDE where all coding is written & run & output captured in the IDE. Although lab computers are Windows, but students arrive with their Windows, MacOS, and [in a couple of cases] Linux laptops. Most languages don't care whether CLI or GUI, so I demo for the student dropping to a terminal/command-line and compile, run, and perform file manipulations -- almost all of them are amazed that the mouse is not necessary to perform the same point-click-drag activities with a keyboard...and in most cases, faster and more efficiently. And always I get the question, "So is why is it necessary to have a graphical interface?" And ask the students for the answer; often they say, "It is not, but GUIs are easier for new users." 😉
I never used rsync, since I always used grsync :) Often it is easier to use the GUI (gufw; grsync), since you don't have to read the manual for the syntax of the command (ufw; rsync) you want to use. I almost never use grsync anymore, since I stored everything in OpenZFS and I use the ZFS "send | ssh receive" commands. I used the command line or job control since 1970, but I was very happy with the Windows GUI in the early nineties. Now I happily mix GUI and CLI, sometimes I use the Software Updater (GUI) and on other moments I use "apt" or "pkg" (CLI).
Normies- “Terminals should be done away with!” Be me, a lawyer who was non-technical until he saw channels like this, switched to linux, riced his kitty terminal, lives in neovim (by choice), tiling window manager, and is live compiling LaTeX files with neovim.- “You do know what we do with heretics right?”
Great video! I think this touched on all the items of value and advantage found in learning and using the Terminal / Shell. I'm semi-competent in shell programming, but I have to note that the syntax for shell scripting can be cryptic and inconsistent. I'm trying to learn enough python to use that for my command line script programs. Would be paradise if there were Bash libraries for clear text and IO handling -- the kind of approach that made ARexx such an easy to use and invaluable interprocess scripting language on the Amiga. ARexx was basically a library extended version of the Rexx language that was used for interprocess communications on mainframes, and in the Exec OS multitasking environment ARexx was brilliant. (: It let me fake it as a programmer for several years :).
The way I look at it is that You should be able to use most application functions with terminal, and then slap a GUI on top of it. Then everyone is happy. You get the power of terminal and You get the user-friendliness of GUI :) This is also a benefit to development, because text-based applications are super easy to test :) In fact layered structure is what makes the operating systems, you get library functions on the lower layer, then You get the text applications, and then you have Services and GUI on top of it. Backend-frontend is not just the web :) Also You missed the ocassion to mention grep (in case of text based configs), and POSIX (in case of standarization) :)) Good video overall.
Even as a Windows user I've seen how valuable the terminal can be. Microsoft often changes the way you configure things in the gui but they usually don't touch the way it's done at the commandline meaning you can often do things the same way in a newer operating systems version even if Microsoft doesn't want you to! Like creating local accounts!
Even with the ease of use of a Mac the terminal can become an indispensable tool for any Unix or Unix-like Operating system even one as simplified as MacOS's gui. The tools at your disposal are almost endless and will let you get the full power of your machine. Most tools are just a GUI layer over terminal commands running in the background. But my time spent with ARCH and FreeBSD really helped me to be fine with the terminal.
Great video, agree with most of your points. Although I have this debate with my coworker often. I'd wager that I can do most of the tasks you use command line for just as fast using a graphical tool. Sure, their is installation, setup, and configuration times... but once you get your shortcuts and menus all laid out and customized - you can be really fast in most tools, and for every example you list where terminal is faster, I could probably give a graphical counter example. Terminal is a must for remote access and file management. But it will have to be a very dark day before you convince be that VIM is better than.. well, anything.
I have been a fan of command line interfaces since i stated in DOS. and i think this helped me get confortable Linux decades ago. I am just starting to use Linux daily, but on my mac when I reboot the first 3 application I load is the temperature monitor, the activity monitor (resource monitor) and the terminal. in the terminal I open 3 tabs 2 are ssh sessions to two of my linux machines and one is to do stuff on the mac that is just easier in the terminal. most of the time i use it to run "df -h" to see if i need to backup some of my video files to my server to clear up space. and as for doing that it is faster to use cp/mv than to drag and drop. I could probably write all day on my uses for the terminal, but i should get back to work. thanks for the video.
The terminal has its great merits and isn't a thing from the past. And for everyone who says the opposite I simply point out what even happened at the windows side of things. Because that is most often the argument ("But on windows I don't need a command line"). They tried the GUI way, the CMD was kind of forgotten, although still useful. And then? The PowerShell came around with its vast possibilities. First optional and now it is the default. Then they incorporated a new terminal emulator. (Dunno if that one was from scratch or based on one of the already existing third party terminals). And lastly, rumors tell, that they want to make the graphical environment optional for server installations. And then the first thing to administrate those would be the terminal + shell (and this can already be done as far as I know. PowerShell remote. So even that is possible on the "forefront" of GUI :D ). It shouldn't be about if something is viewed as obsolete. It should only be about what task is to be done and how it can be efficiently solved.
I think, there is a certain trend over the last years (in desktop computing) to use the keyboard more. Especially in Gnome or Windows it's much faster to hit the win-key and start typing the name of the program you want, than to switch to your mouse and navigate through menus. And the terminal could (imho) benefit from this trend , because it can do the same and is even mightier.
I use the terminal mainly when i'm doing admin work on my small minecraft server. It just feels faster, even if i'm only doing basic things like copying files and editing config files. I don't have to manage a whole bunch of windows. Thanks for the tip about scp
The terminal is very important and for Unix and Unix like systems it’s pretty easy to catch on. I still am terrible at remembering cmd commands so I try to use powershell as much as possible since it’s a bit similar
Great video Veronica and I have come to agree with you regarding the terminal. I am also a sysadmin mostly in the Azure sphere and am constantly using PowerShell which made for an easy transition into terminal with Nix based systems. I would suspect most people would be the other way around but here we are... LOL Keep up the great work and see you in the next one :)
Also the dev side of things. GUIs require a significant amount of extra work which will never be free. Since I have stopped broken GUIs I can't name an example right now. But most people probably have a few.
I got my start with punched cards, over 50 years ago, so the terminal was a big step *UP* for me 😎 Terminal vs GUI has never been an "either/or" for me: it's always a "both/and" (once I had both available). I mostly did embedded work in my career, so it was usually a cycle of edit in the GUI (it's very important to me to have the library header file, or the spec for the protocol, side-by-side with my code. I hate jumping from tab to tab in an IDE), then compile and download from the command line. WHen I'm engaged in an online political debate, I'll download the historical statistics into a CSV file, use command line tools to select the relevant parts, then pop them into a spreadsheet or a plot to see them clearly. Your screwdriver-vs-drill analogy was a good idea, but I think saw-plus sandpaper is better: you need b*both* to get the job done efficiently. Thanks for doing this. I've just discovered your channel, and I see other videos that I'll definitely want to watch, for both education and entertainment.
I know very little about terminal, the only time I use it is to use ffmpeg to edit videos on a chromebook, when I used a ffmpeg based GUI video editor for the first time I knew exactly the function of each and every button, kinda fun and useful really.
I'm a Windows Server Admin by day so over the last few years have grown to fall in love with Powershell. It took a while but doing my daily tasks is now so much quicker in Powershell and much more rewarding than clicking the mouse around everywhere. My goal is to get to a stage where I never need to use that blasted mouse again! I may be biased towards Powershell but I am really struggling with the Linux terminal. It's just a little bit tougher to understand because there doesn't seem to be this standard convention that Powershell follows. There's some minor inconsistencies that I stumble on and some of the help files really just... Well, they don't just help! I have to end up resorting to Google which makes me sad because I feel like it should all be clear in the program itself. I really am hoping I'm missing things myself and at some point it will all just click but beginning to think it never will because it always depends how that person wrote that specific program. Despite this, I strongly agree that anyone in IT should familiarise themselves with a Terminal because it's incredibly powerful and an absolute game changer. Oh and by the way you can install Vim on Windows and then in Powershell you can add an alias to your Profile File (same concept as a Bash Profile, your profile path be found by typing in "$Profile" in Powershell). Here's an example, assuming I guessed the file path right: Set-Alias -Name vim -Path c:\program files\vim\vim.exe
i remember the old days of using my tandy color computer 3 (512k) os9 level 2, and terminal was all you had. i miss those days, but i only use linux as my daily driver, and terminal is the best way to go for anything.
ICYMI: I wrote up a quick blog post to address "Linux supremacy" arguments that might spring forth from this discussion. :P
vkc.sh/lets-talk-about-linux-supremacy/
I don't believe Linux users are superior to the users of other operating systems, but I'm firmly convinced Linux is superior to other operating systems!
@@tmbrwn Yeah, fair enough. I tend to be a bit more extreme than is really necessary! 🙂
Trash talking is what politicians and those wrestlers do. Coaches on the other hand, concern themselves with any areas that could be improved in the team they coach. Yes they do look at what the competition is doing right and use that to further improve their team. Often, trash talkers totally fail to see these strengths in the competition as they only focus on finding supposed faults.
I am less concerned about competitors over taking linux and more concerned about forces that will work to turn linux into a mainstream OS with all those great aspects of linux that many of us love, such as the powerful command line, disappearing one day. I just bought a Pinephone, only to discover one of the OSes, had stripped away some of the USB serial terminal support. I found an open issue for it. The resolution was that the identified USB serial terminal would be re-added, but this was not a typical use case for a phone, so it was considered a one time fix.
See how the focus of the developers is to turn the linux distro into one built for typical phone users. The whole point of having linux on the phone for me, was to be able to do what linux could do, on a small portable device. In my case, connect to a wide variety of microcontrollers. Currently, my Xiao nrf52840 sense works on my two Pi systems, but only the storage profile works on my Pinephone, not the serial.
I gave this example just to show how easy it is for those great features in linux, to disappear while many of us are not in need of them, and may be impossible to bring back when we do one day have a use for them.
My guess is that the person in question havent worked with infrastructure, but only software development in an IDE? :D
I have heard the exact same argument for likewise people.
After 4 years of working full time on linux environments, albeit being forced to run ssh through a Window(s), I just completed the first part of a linux sysadmin cert.
@@WillKemp To an extent that may have had some validity 20 years ago do to survivorship bias, these days, modern Linux distros are at least as easy to use as Windows is.
There is one thing that I feel that you missed mentioning. That is command-line tools and how they can work together using piping (i.e. the '|' character). And that is something that GUI programs can not do. And it is also part of the whole Unix ethos.
I thought about expanding the whole "bash scripting" section of this video after I recorded it, but in the end I left it short and off-the-cuff.
But absolutely, pipes and stdin/stdout are all extremely important elements that folks should learn!!
@@mainStream-user Not quite! MS-DOS has had piping and file redirection since version 2.0 from 1983. It was based on UNIX pipes/redir. Around this time Microsoft was working on Xenix, their own UNIX variant. Subsequent versions of OS/2 and Windows NT copied how DOS pipes worked to retain compatibility.
Pipes are uncommon with GUI apps but not impossible.
Some Linux/BSD GUI editors like gedit and gvim will accept text from stdin, eg. uname -a | gedit -
Many Linux/BSD apps will spit out various debugging info to stdout or stderr if you run them from the terminal.
Technically this is possible in Windows GUI apps too using AttachConsole(), but it's a bit of an odd hack.
@@VeronicaExplains Yeah the whole idea of a tool chain on the command-line is an awesome Unixy type thing.
I often use command line tools such as grep, less, more, wc, etc. in Windows. There is a GNU port of most of them that works well, for most things.
CLI is "using your words" vs "pointing and grunting". It's where the efficiency is.
Lol
It's basically "talking to the OS to get the job done". Bash script is a long conversation, a script as is used in videos or movies.
Keep in mind that there are only 5 places on a monitor that you can hit with a mouse without looking. The 4 corners and wherever the mouse is already located. With a keyboard, you've got 9 without even moving any fingers.
The knowing how to use the command line is like knowing magic. It takes effort to learn, if you accidentally use the wrong words things can get weird, and it's incredibly powerful.
Speaking as a man who started working on storage devices with a CDC 16 million word drive (the type with 5 platters), I used a terminal of some kind since the very beginning.
Not being able to use a terminal is like having to use a calculator because you can't add numbers on paper. A person needs to know just want they are TRULY doing when they drag and drop.
The terminal isn't just a way to do things, it's a way to understand things.
BTW.... I think your approach to explaining things is about the best on youtube. Clear and concise.
Well said! And thank you!
I did not realize there are Linux users who do not use the terminal. All the terminal tools are what make Linux so powerful. Thank you for educating me on the existence of these strange non-terminal creatures.
These days, it's probably more common than you'd think. There are GUIs out there to handle basically any common task.
The working the terminal from anywhere is true. I was able to support a failed system in the middle of a demo while I was in theater over my phone.
I’d actually like to see more graphical applications offer a terminal interface. Basically let you run a terminal version of the graphical app. It would make it easier to automate some tasks but still let you use the graphical interface when you feel like it.
There’s a certain kind of enjoyment I get from using graphical applications and a different kind of enjoyment I get from using terminal based applications. I wouldn’t want to see either one disappear.
IMHO, the best GUI applications are basically just interfaces for commandline programs that simply put the necessary command together for you, so that you're not dealing with a super long command to type out, but can if you want to, or choose to save it for use again. Handbrake is kind of nice because it allows you to export the settings for use in the terminal or just use again in the future. That's super nice for things like TV series where you might not want to waste the space of storing the episode on your computer when you aren't planning on watching it again for another year and can just quickly tell it to do the conversion again while you do other things without reconfiguring things.
I am so happy you have the Repair Manifesto poster :-)
I learnt Linux in school. Focus was terminal, we only explored the different GUI options briefly. Today, 20 years later, the Linux machines I use nowadays are all headless and I use Mac as my desktop daily driver. Still use the terminal extensively. And you know what? Nano works splendidly on my Mac.
The Terminal AND a well loved M18? I have never felt more seen by a TH-camr.
I'm new to linux and having a blast learning terminal.
The thing I particularly appreciate about the terminal is the ability to do things "unattended" - whether it's background jobs, scheduled jobs (cron) or long-running commands where I might not stay connected to the machine in question. Which leads me to my love for terminal multiplexers, tmux or GNU screen.
IMHO, automation, is arguably the biggest advantage of the CLI. You can automate just about anything that has a CLI option with any language that you want to use, although Bash and PowerShell are probably the most popular choices due to just being on a bunch of computers already.
Five years down my Linux road, the terminal and I still have a slightly strained relationship, witch is absurd since I started out with a Arch install with no prevous knowledge (Yes, Im an idiot), but I'm using it moore and more; it is a fantastic tool... and so am I.
I actually just wanted to say thanks for your videos, I truly enjoy them.
Lmao, starting with Arch Linux totally sounds like me after getting frustrated with Ubuntu
@@eloskowy4954 same here, but with mint. Never going back.
4:20 Most important, you do version control on text based config files.
Wow you are running Contiki desktop on the c64, so cool.
I think the thing that makes GUIs user-friendly is that they are discoverable. One can see many functions an application provides just by looking at the screen. The advantage of terminal apps is that most of the time (even non-power users) do not need the discoverability: they know exactly what they want. When going through the filesystem, I often know the top few directories, I do not need to discover them, so I can use `cd`. Sometimes I mix the two: I will go to the project folder with cd (because I know the path) but then `xdg-open` to discover the parts I am not familiar with.
The discoverability can even be overwhelming sometimes. There was a mock-up named "If OpenSSL were a GUI" that showed what OpenSSL would look like if it was a GUI tool with all the options and it was massive. With CLI apps, one can easily ignore the parts that are not relevant for them. GUI apps need to either become very complicated to support all the options a CLI app offers, or give up the less popular functionality to keep the application manageable (which is not a bad thing).
Indeed, command line is extremely easy to document, and is extremely searchable. Most of us can search the web for exactly the task we have in mind. (Or dear I say, know how to use the command's own help functionality and man pages) Honestly for a GUI to do the same functionality it has to become a crazy maze which is helpful to no one. (It's possible to make use of better design for better GUI, but it would require far more resources than most teams have). There is a reason why when being asked for help linux guru's like to just paste a command that will solve the problem, as oppose to making a huge document with screenshots.
@@joshuapettus6973 The thing that drives me bonkers about manpages and help is that they are far too often devoid of any practical information. I've been using Imagemagick to "compress" images (convert PNGs to smaller JPGs or GIFs) and do some cropping, but the manpage for Imagemagick is useless and convert's manpage is only slightly better. You are REQUIRED to go online to get working, usable help.
'man convert' yields:
-crop geometry cut out a rectangular region of the image
Searching online gives me an actual useful command:
convert -crop 640x480+200+100 image.png image.jpg will convert the image to a jpg and crop a 640x480 region of the png 100 pixels down and 200 pixels right from the top left corner of the png.
GUIs used to be discoverable. And then Apple invented iOS.
That used to be the case, but it's been getting worse over the last 10-20 years. The commandline is plenty discoverable and all tools have some way of printing out every possible commandline argument. The hard part of the commandline is creatively thinking about how to combine different commands to do things.
Even if I recommend ways that does not include terminal for newcomers, I always find myself in terminal for even simple stuff. I think eventually everyone who passes the basic learning curve will use the terminal.
If the only things you use in the terminal are htop and some simple text editor, you are acceptable to me. In my opinion, avoiding those two is literally harder and less user friendly.
@@MrBearyMcBearface The usual way people come to appreciate the terminal these days is starting with things like that and seeing the cool stuff that can be incrementally added.
This is not a practical answer, but for me the terminal is a nostalgic thing. I learned computers back in the 80s using DOS. I remember having thick books with instructions and learning that I can just type commands in and get whole programs to do things for me. It felt like wizardry to my child mind. Using the terminal in linux still kinda feels that way now.
I remember upgrading from DOS 5 to 6.22. I got the full retail IBM box edition with all the floppy disks and 3 ring binders. Perhaps like you that is why I also love terminals. I also was introduced to Linux in the late 90's on Slackware and learned to compile my own kernels and would take advantage of multiple terminals.
@@Wandering_Horse DOS 6.22 with the "move" command. I remember that one that was big time! My first distro was Debian 2 in the late 90's for a CS course. I should have used Slackware. I feel like the dependency hell of dpkg at the time was more than I should have taken on with a 33.6 kbps modem.
@@Brian-qv1ir Haha, I had forgot about the hellscape of never ending dependencies! New users dont get to experience that forgone era of pain. I remember asking my mentor a question and his response was almost always 'it depends', I hated that answer. Then there was asking the email user groups for help, boy you had better have read the man page and did your research first otherwise you would get scolded with the dreaded 'RTFM!'. (Admittedly, in doing so you would most likely find the answer) So happy linux has largely moved past those dark days. New users today have no idea how much easier and mainstream Linux is nowadays. Cheers!
I love your enthusiasm for what you do Veronica, and I appreciate learning more through your channel. You and I are of similar vintage, but I didn't have much access to computers in the DOS or Amiga days. As such, the first system I could really get my hands on to learn on my own schedule was a windows 95 Pentium 133. I feel like learning computers via command line vs GUI is the difference between learning carpentry and going to IKEA. Command line is still not home for me, but I work on learning and understanding more.
you are awesome ! , you make me fall in love with Linux and terminal again and again
Using windows terminal every now and then.
Love the customizability 😍
CLI (terminal) is the manual transmission of operating system. When you use it you are closer to your machine. When I use Windows on my laptop, I have always a ssh session opened on Windows terminal, connected to my linux desktop and I feels home. I can be in an other city and it still works.
To an extent that's the sort of environment that the commandline was originally intended for. Early on, most people didn't have direct access to the computer, so much of it would be over a dumb terminal to the mainframe.
Love the disclaimer! You are so fun to watch! Ibam learning alot!
Loved the screwdriver / power drill analogy. Brilliant!
🎉🎉🎉 YES YES YES to Celebrating the Terminal!! 🎉 🎉🎉 For all the reasons you stated and more! Having a standardized box full of familiar, simple, reliable, interoperable, consistent, and proven tools is where the REAL power of the User is realized.
Your second last point is exactly why i love the terminal. I use it to chain basic (or hard to remember) commands for doing my daily things into a shell script which the rest of my team can then use (build jobs, testing, etc) some of which are significantly harder to do in a gui-based app and becomes a one line command to remember vs 100 steps
I couldn't hve said it better myself! You have a gift for explaing Linux related concepts in a simple way - so *anyone* can understand!
I wish you'd post videos more often...
YOU'RE AWSOME!
2 years later, and yes, I love using the terminal, and when i use it, it makes me feel the computer is actually listening to me, unlike when you press a gui button and nothing happens. When nothing happens in a terminal command, you know you typed it wrong.
In fact, I had the vision that our carsharing provider would offer a terminal application to book their cars, I often don't like these fancy graphical interfaces when they're not really fast and well made, and that is very often the case, so...
I remember to partition my harddrive via terminal commands because of having all features without using external tools. Very efficient!
I have been using Linux since March 93 and as a totally blind user I find the terminal efficient, easy to use and it lets me do a lot of the heavy lifting tasks that would be difficult in the GUI. I do use Windows and the NVDA screen reader as too many emails contain attachments that are not easily viewable in the terminal and sound editing is easier in the GUI, never got the hang of Ecasound.
I use the shell in windows as well, never really made friends with the mac although the last one I had was back in 2007, the terminal was nice though.
Which web browser do you use? I tend to stick with Lynx for the most part, but I'm sighted.
@@encycl07pedia- I use lynx at a console but rarely surf the web with Linux, I use it for my servers mostly. If I were surfing web on the desktop most things require Java-script so I would use Firefox/Iceweasel. W3m also isn't bad under Emacs I am told
I appreciate this very much. Lately I've had the urge to learn the terminal for efficiency's sake and I LOVE Efficiency as I struggle with it on the day-to-day with ADHD. If I had the terminal to organize my cupboards that'd be epic :D
When I introduce someone to Linux, I like to tell them about the terminal and that 'It's fun, there's so much you can do and makes you feel like a pro even if it's something simple through a few lines on the screen"
Very good point👍
Great video as always! I've been using Linux (and the terminal) for about 2 years now and I love every aspect of it, even though I know I still have a lot to learn, it's an awesome tool.
THIS CHANNEL IS AWESOME !
LOVE UR LETTER IN THE GRASS BTW !
I love the Terminal too, it's awesome how fast shit goes in the Terminal and I love to use it when I need something specific, but going Terminal only is something I don't want to do but who knows, maybe I become a Terminal Wizard too some day. Blessed be the sacred Terminal.
Thank you very much for this video.
I found it very inspiring to get a little more involved with the terminal.
I'm here for the C64, not really but what a lovely machine. Great video, I like the analogy of using a power tool versus regular screwdriver, it certainly is how it feels sometimes using a GUI based app.
Nice video Veronica. I would add two advantages 1) on the terminal, programs can easily "talk" using pipes and redirection, thus combining small tools to do big things! 2) with the teeminal, is much easier explaining to someone else how to exactky do something. This much harder with graphical tools! (A consequence of the standarization!).
On the topic of shell scripting, it also bears mentioning how powerful `make` is. If your objective is to consume files, process them, and emit other files, `make` is the ultra-terminal to automate that procedure by firing shell commands for you, getting you fast turns on your project as you improve your process. There is no equivalent to make in a GUI all because it all starts with the terminal.
Veronica thank you for this video! I’m not the only one that loves the terminal. It’s just so Linux-y!!! I have a video idea: as a former COBOL systems analyst/programmer I think it would be awesome for you to do a COBOL video since there are tons of legacy systems out there on mature hardware using COBOL and we could use more people interested in learning the language. Thanks!
I've thought quite a bit about it! I have algorithm-related concerns about diving into COBOL discussions, but I might dip my toe in the water with a "how to try COBOL with Gnucobol" at some point down the road. If it doesn't completely tank, I could imagine doing a few more practical examples. (Exploring IBM stuff would also be important!) We need more COBOL devs!
@@VeronicaExplains i second that request
Bravo! Your video is an excellent defense of the terminal. I used CP/M and AppleDOS at first, then DOS, Windows, and OS/2, then Linux, and used the command line interface in all those systems. I enjoy the prettiness of a GUI, but in every system I have used, the command line is usually the faster and simpler way to get admin stuff and file management done. Thanks! 😀
Yep. I find myself using the terminal more often than I would have thought. Also bought a 568B T-shirt and a Linux is Awesome hoodie - they're great!!
THANK YOU! It's so helpful for the channel- every bit of merch brings me one step closer to taking a day off to edit every now and again! :)
One of the best things about the terminal is that you can (usually) change how a particular command or program works with a dash and a letter or combination of letters. No need to muck around in menus and settings to find that one thing you need to change. Just add a letter. Don't know the letters? Man it.
Awesome video!
I agree, the "terminal" is more "muscle memory doing something and not thinking about it" vs. the "graphical" "find the stupid cursor (stupid Windows(R)), place it where it's needed, and do something", lots of hand-eye-mouse-monitor-desk coordinating.
Btw...
Please, please, please do a playlist of terminal only apps to complete day to day tasks.
I'd be interested in knowing what's good and what's not out there for everyday office things like word processing (not text-only like the cult of Vim and church of Emacs), spreadsheeting, web browsing, and email.
You can even do everything via a dot-matrix printer, turn it into a soundtrack to accompany the bop it!
Such a great video! (What e-reader was that?)
I’m new at Linux. I figured if you use the software stores everything will be sweet. The lesson, when all else fails, the TERMINAL, will save you. It ain’t that hard
I love the terminal. It was very easy to pick up for me when I started using Linux 2 years ago.
#An ode to the Terminal
> 'Stuck in front of the window, you feel a void That Triggers You'
> 'But if you dare cross that window, you'll see yourself type Thanks To You'
#Terminal is love, terminal is life
I really enjoy when you do these more unscripted videos. While your scripted stuff is often funny, quirky and so very original, sometimes it's nice seeing something less produced. I mean you have one of the highest production value Linux/Technology themed channels out there, which often falls into more of a "neck beard" esthetic. I can really see how much work you put into these videos and how emphatic you are about the subject matter. Keep up the great work...
Oh and great points about the terminal, although I am sure you're mostly preaching to the choir. I find TUIs to be a happy middle ground for some things.
Part of the reason I learned vim was to force myself to live in the terminal. Next thing you know, my friend showed me tmux and I wanted to learn how to use it. Now I have a workflow involving the terminal and kept learning tricks or finding useful tools that sped up my productivity. I think that’s the thing, learn the basics and then you can pick up new tricks or commands based on the work you do
Thank you Veronica for the good serious work you put into your blogs.
I would love to get more about terminal work if you please.
As I understand it, knowing how to use the terminal is knowing how to use Linux.
Thanks again and all the best.
It helps if you have used MS-DOS (or similar) in the past, then the concept of a terminal is not completely strange or foreign to you. In university we used the terminal extensively and almost exclusively, we even had a mandatory course all about using the text based linux utilities in the terminal and learning to script using bash. It's very useful! When my professor (who happens to be the author of TextCat) wanted to send me an e-mail, I expected him to open his mail client (GUI) or perhaps open the web-based client. Instead he opened a terminal, typed a few lines and the e-mail was on its way! And why not, it saves a lot of time this way.
Yes, although the DOS commandline was a lot less fully-featured as it needed to run on computers with far fewer resources than the ones that Unix was designed for. DOS was expanded over the years as new versions came out with newer computers being available, but it was never as powerful as the OSes that started out in academic institutions.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade Thanks for your reply!
I'm still an intern in the Linux world, but still totally agree with you. The "outsiders" (haters) think it's just some magic tricky-like from the Linux user to try looking like a hacker or something, but the truth is far away from this. I'm literally using the ssh just for keeping up to date my PCs at home sometimes from my phone. At my job, I'm working in different environments sometimes, and I also experience the blessing of standardization immediately when I'm able to get any terminal (oh what am I say... it's SHELL! :) ).
Difficult to learn? Yes, I'm still just a google searcher script kid. But it's/will be beneficial? Freakin' YES!
Hi Veronica! I definitely agree with all your arguments. You can add another argument: it's easier to assist on the phone or with text chat with command line tools. With a graphical app, you have to remember the interface, where to click, etc.
I agree! I use the terminal everyday! I manage a series of Linux servers without a GUI. The applicaiton is terminal based as well. TMUX became my standard tool once I learned how to customize it. On my work Windoze PC I use WSL and just started to use MULTIPASS from ubuntu w/HyperV backend. I find it faster than WSL and easier to customize memory, cores and disk sizes on the fly. Thanks for the video. Long live the terminal!!
In 20 years of using linux I have never used a gui on my systems. CLI is all I’ve ever needed and coming from Apple //e through to Unix and dos it just makes more sense to me. I still use my //e as a terminal for my linux boxes
I know this is an older video but I do think the terminal has it's place, as well as being an important piece of the Linux experience onion. Personally, I don't use it a lot but there's an increasing number of commands/tools I do find myself reaching for. Love the deployment idea though. I may not be deploying servers but another part of the Linux experience is distro hopping. The idea of a folder with a bunch of configs to quickly make your new home fell like home sounds great. Might need to look at moving towards more terminal/text config file friendly applications!
Great video.
A big advantage with the terminal is the ability to easily repeat commands, whether that's by scrolling backwards through your command history to find a command you've used before, or running a shell script you've written with a list of commands you want to run in a particular order. sh/bash/zsh scripts can be surprisingly powerful too - often good enough that you don't need to resort to using something like Python to do certain tasks.
Your hypothetical example at 7:30 of renaming 700 files at once can actually be replicated in the GUI in recent versions of MacOS reasonably well. Finder's (batch) Rename allows you to replace, prepend/append or number text within filenames. It's something I really wish Ubuntu's Nemo file manager did, though using "thunar --bulk-rename" seems to fill the void there. The advantage of doing this over using a bash script is that you get a preview of the destination filenames before actually performing the rename, making it a lot less dangerous to use. Though you could probably write a bash script to work the same way if you needed to.
In any case often times (particularly when connected to a remote server) I will use the nnn file manager in the terminal to do batch renaming, which uses a text editor to edit the list of destination filenames. nnn is one of my favourite new tools, and will run basically anywhere you can get a shell prompt.
If I had a second computer I would definitely use the terminal more often than I do at the minute. Used to love using MS-DOS, CP/M and others.
I use the terminal on Linux a lot. I also used the command window to setup an offline account for my desk tower PC.
On the other day a friend of mine that always use GUI-based programs on a Mac to do his job asked me how to squash a series of commits. He was unable to do it properly.
Then I grabbed three lines of git commands that I have saved in my text files because I often forgot all the commands and just send it back to him. And it's done.
Terminal-based applications will be almost universal across different OSes. You will reduce the amount of work on how to do things.
Same applies with Terraform for example: The way I can create a loop on how to create a 'for_each' loop to create Subnets for each Availability Zone of a Region will work almost in the same way if I am using AWS, Azure, GCP, or Oracle. I don't need to login to each service provider to know WHERE to look at in order to create this. Each interface will be different. On Terraform, I just have to take a look what parameters I need to pass on. It's quite straighforward.
I certainly agree. As someone who has utilized and used dual-booting of various Linux distros alongside Windows over the years, at first the terminal seemed just a headache to work around. However, when I finally made myself work at it, it was then that I understood what, at least for me, was a big part of the Linux appeal. I knew DOS/command prompt, at least commonly used commands, but now I find myself less discontented with Windows 10 in recent years, and use Windows Powershell way more. Plus, the feel of using old-school, keyed-command-driven computing again sure is nice. Early on, GUIs started dumbing us down, the introduction of the mouse, touchscreens, spellcheck, and autocomplete got us docile, lazy, and tenderized for algorithmic manipulation, smartphones, data mining, the crypto scam, etc. Disconnect (from skynet and get back to the internet), sit back, plug in, and go a typing, scripting, etc. I say. :)
I truly agree with you, let's celebrate the terminal
I learn to love the terminal. I'm from windows and converted my machine to Linux. I sometimes finding software here that if there is a CLI version of it, then that's I'm gonna use. It sometimes feel nostalgic for me the first time I met DOS mode.
Your comment about using the terminal gives you a better understanding of how the computer works, same with a car, you don't have to know how a car works to be a good driver but it may help you to remedy some issues.
Tab-completion and wildcards should be mentioned, too. These make the terminal waaaaay faster than using file explorers and are being used in nearly every command you type.
Excellent video!!! When switching from Mac to Linux I hated the terminal. I LOVE it now!!!!! 😀
Syntax = pages and pages of graphical options and widgets. This can be hard, like with regular expressions, but worth it when one can then express intent with crazy fast and high level precision.
The command line offers syntax to compete with drag and drop. Worth your time.
The terminal makes putting in and removing programs with correct repository for updates very easy.
The primary Linux distribution I use is Linux Mint, and while it includes a good GUI for updating the system and installing software, sometimes I still use the terminal because it's faster! It's very good that those GUIs exist for newer users, but I'm glad I learned the terminal, at least to a basic degree.
terminal will not go away and thanks for reminding us. Terminal rocks. (and this coming from a relative amateur linuxer)
I teach a general introductory programming course (using Java) at my local university. Of course, we keep things as simple & straight-forward for students, so we have a nice & comfortable graphical IDE where all coding is written & run & output captured in the IDE.
Although lab computers are Windows, but students arrive with their Windows, MacOS, and [in a couple of cases] Linux laptops.
Most languages don't care whether CLI or GUI, so I demo for the student dropping to a terminal/command-line and compile, run, and perform file manipulations -- almost all of them are amazed that the mouse is not necessary to perform the same point-click-drag activities with a keyboard...and in most cases, faster and more efficiently.
And always I get the question, "So is why is it necessary to have a graphical interface?" And ask the students for the answer; often they say, "It is not, but GUIs are easier for new users." 😉
I never used rsync, since I always used grsync :) Often it is easier to use the GUI (gufw; grsync), since you don't have to read the manual for the syntax of the command (ufw; rsync) you want to use. I almost never use grsync anymore, since I stored everything in OpenZFS and I use the ZFS "send | ssh receive" commands. I used the command line or job control since 1970, but I was very happy with the Windows GUI in the early nineties. Now I happily mix GUI and CLI, sometimes I use the Software Updater (GUI) and on other moments I use "apt" or "pkg" (CLI).
Normies- “Terminals should be done away with!”
Be me, a lawyer who was non-technical until he saw channels like this, switched to linux, riced his kitty terminal, lives in neovim (by choice), tiling window manager, and is live compiling LaTeX files with neovim.- “You do know what we do with heretics right?”
Great video! I think this touched on all the items of value and advantage found in learning and using the Terminal / Shell. I'm semi-competent in shell programming, but I have to note that the syntax for shell scripting can be cryptic and inconsistent. I'm trying to learn enough python to use that for my command line script programs. Would be paradise if there were Bash libraries for clear text and IO handling -- the kind of approach that made ARexx such an easy to use and invaluable interprocess scripting language on the Amiga. ARexx was basically a library extended version of the Rexx language that was used for interprocess communications on mainframes, and in the Exec OS multitasking environment ARexx was brilliant. (: It let me fake it as a programmer for several years :).
I work on Power processor based enterprise systems. The terminal is an absolute must. I’ll take terminal over GUI any day!!
The way I look at it is that You should be able to use most application functions with terminal, and then slap a GUI on top of it. Then everyone is happy. You get the power of terminal and You get the user-friendliness of GUI :) This is also a benefit to development, because text-based applications are super easy to test :)
In fact layered structure is what makes the operating systems, you get library functions on the lower layer, then You get the text applications, and then you have Services and GUI on top of it. Backend-frontend is not just the web :)
Also You missed the ocassion to mention grep (in case of text based configs), and POSIX (in case of standarization) :))
Good video overall.
Even as a Windows user I've seen how valuable the terminal can be. Microsoft often changes the way you configure things in the gui but they usually don't touch the way it's done at the commandline meaning you can often do things the same way in a newer operating systems version even if Microsoft doesn't want you to! Like creating local accounts!
veronica.... you are awesomer , thanks for a fab vid.
As always writing a comment to support the channel
Even with the ease of use of a Mac the terminal can become an indispensable tool for any Unix or Unix-like Operating system even one as simplified as MacOS's gui. The tools at your disposal are almost endless and will let you get the full power of your machine. Most tools are just a GUI layer over terminal commands running in the background. But my time spent with ARCH and FreeBSD really helped me to be fine with the terminal.
Love your videos! Keep on rocking!!! :)
Great video, agree with most of your points. Although I have this debate with my coworker often. I'd wager that I can do most of the tasks you use command line for just as fast using a graphical tool. Sure, their is installation, setup, and configuration times... but once you get your shortcuts and menus all laid out and customized - you can be really fast in most tools, and for every example you list where terminal is faster, I could probably give a graphical counter example. Terminal is a must for remote access and file management. But it will have to be a very dark day before you convince be that VIM is better than.. well, anything.
Hey now, no editor shaming!
I have been a fan of command line interfaces since i stated in DOS. and i think this helped me get confortable Linux decades ago. I am just starting to use Linux daily, but on my mac when I reboot the first 3 application I load is the temperature monitor, the activity monitor (resource monitor) and the terminal. in the terminal I open 3 tabs 2 are ssh sessions to two of my linux machines and one is to do stuff on the mac that is just easier in the terminal. most of the time i use it to run "df -h" to see if i need to backup some of my video files to my server to clear up space. and as for doing that it is faster to use cp/mv than to drag and drop. I could probably write all day on my uses for the terminal, but i should get back to work. thanks for the video.
I've been in the industry for 40-odd years. All the heavyweights still use CLI, Cisco/*UX/storage arrays, the lot
The terminal has its great merits and isn't a thing from the past. And for everyone who says the opposite I simply point out what even happened at the windows side of things. Because that is most often the argument ("But on windows I don't need a command line").
They tried the GUI way, the CMD was kind of forgotten, although still useful. And then? The PowerShell came around with its vast possibilities. First optional and now it is the default. Then they incorporated a new terminal emulator. (Dunno if that one was from scratch or based on one of the already existing third party terminals).
And lastly, rumors tell, that they want to make the graphical environment optional for server installations. And then the first thing to administrate those would be the terminal + shell (and this can already be done as far as I know. PowerShell remote. So even that is possible on the "forefront" of GUI :D ).
It shouldn't be about if something is viewed as obsolete. It should only be about what task is to be done and how it can be efficiently solved.
I think, there is a certain trend over the last years (in desktop computing) to use the keyboard more. Especially in Gnome or Windows it's much faster to hit the win-key and start typing the name of the program you want, than to switch to your mouse and navigate through menus. And the terminal could (imho) benefit from this trend , because it can do the same and is even mightier.
I use the terminal mainly when i'm doing admin work on my small minecraft server. It just feels faster, even if i'm only doing basic things like copying files and editing config files. I don't have to manage a whole bunch of windows. Thanks for the tip about scp
Thank you Veronica 🙏🏻
So are you. Thanks for this great video. I love the terminal
The terminal is very important and for Unix and Unix like systems it’s pretty easy to catch on. I still am terrible at remembering cmd commands so I try to use powershell as much as possible since it’s a bit similar
Great video Veronica and I have come to agree with you regarding the terminal. I am also a sysadmin mostly in the Azure sphere and am constantly using PowerShell which made for an easy transition into terminal with Nix based systems. I would suspect most people would be the other way around but here we are... LOL Keep up the great work and see you in the next one :)
Also the dev side of things. GUIs require a significant amount of extra work which will never be free. Since I have stopped broken GUIs I can't name an example right now. But most people probably have a few.
I always use the Terminal. :)
I got my start with punched cards, over 50 years ago, so the terminal was a big step *UP* for me 😎
Terminal vs GUI has never been an "either/or" for me: it's always a "both/and" (once I had both available). I mostly did embedded work in my career, so it was usually a cycle of edit in the GUI (it's very important to me to have the library header file, or the spec for the protocol, side-by-side with my code. I hate jumping from tab to tab in an IDE), then compile and download from the command line.
WHen I'm engaged in an online political debate, I'll download the historical statistics into a CSV file, use command line tools to select the relevant parts, then pop them into a spreadsheet or a plot to see them clearly.
Your screwdriver-vs-drill analogy was a good idea, but I think saw-plus sandpaper is better: you need b*both* to get the job done efficiently.
Thanks for doing this. I've just discovered your channel, and I see other videos that I'll definitely want to watch, for both education and entertainment.
I know very little about terminal, the only time I use it is to use ffmpeg to edit videos on a chromebook, when I used a ffmpeg based GUI video editor for the first time I knew exactly the function of each and every button, kinda fun and useful really.
Super, Veronica! Tank yew!!
I'm a Windows Server Admin by day so over the last few years have grown to fall in love with Powershell. It took a while but doing my daily tasks is now so much quicker in Powershell and much more rewarding than clicking the mouse around everywhere. My goal is to get to a stage where I never need to use that blasted mouse again!
I may be biased towards Powershell but I am really struggling with the Linux terminal. It's just a little bit tougher to understand because there doesn't seem to be this standard convention that Powershell follows. There's some minor inconsistencies that I stumble on and some of the help files really just... Well, they don't just help! I have to end up resorting to Google which makes me sad because I feel like it should all be clear in the program itself. I really am hoping I'm missing things myself and at some point it will all just click but beginning to think it never will because it always depends how that person wrote that specific program. Despite this, I strongly agree that anyone in IT should familiarise themselves with a Terminal because it's incredibly powerful and an absolute game changer.
Oh and by the way you can install Vim on Windows and then in Powershell you can add an alias to your Profile File (same concept as a Bash Profile, your profile path be found by typing in "$Profile" in Powershell). Here's an example, assuming I guessed the file path right:
Set-Alias -Name vim -Path c:\program files\vim\vim.exe
i remember the old days of using my tandy color computer 3 (512k) os9 level 2, and terminal was all you had. i miss those days, but i only use linux as my daily driver, and terminal is the best way to go for anything.
Windows terminal user here. Powershell, our ugly pet, we hate it but we also love it. It is stinky but still a part of the family