OR: Why my grandmother uses the terminal and yours should too.
The terminal is always a hot topic amongst Linux users, whether you think it’s a barrier to new users or the greatest thing since sliced bread. I came up with a list of fun reasons why any Linux user, from Noob to Root should want to use the terminal. These are in no particular order.
Please add your own reasons too. This could be the definitive guide to why the terminal is fantastic.
Accessibility
The terminal is in your language (most likely). It’s merely text so it resizes easily to suit your eyesight needs and screen reading software will have no trouble at all. Speech to text probably works fine too. Whatever cards life dealt you, there’s a way to use the terminal. Avoid seemingly non-sensicle icons of things that don’t exist anymore (what’s a floppy disk and what does it have to do with saving anything???) just
:wq
your way to productivity, sweet, explicit, unambiguous productivity.
OG Dark Mode
The terminal has always been white or green text on a black background. After all these years, the ORIGINAL colour scheme is coming back to a GUI near you. Tell your friends you’ve been using dark themes since before it was cool.
Verbose output
Running applications from CLI is the best way to find out what is going on when things don’t work. Instead of flooding the Nooby forums with “Help, <application> doesn’t work!” you might be able to search for a previously found solution with specific errors from the console output. If not, at least you have something useful to share with people who could help right away.
Promotes literacy
I can foresee a future where the young generation only communicate with emoticons. Whole sentences strung together with nothing but glyphs of yellow cartoon faces and the odd eggplant. Combat this dystopian future with CLI and trick your kids into reading with some classic text based adventure games!
Universal UI
No matter what DE you are using, terminal commands don’t change. Grandmas got the window buttons on the left? Uncle Edgar prefers the bar at the top? (like a sane person should) Evade the labyrinth of personal preferences and get rid of TeamViewer, just
apt upgrade
already!
Friggen Aliases
When
sudo zypper dup
starts to look like the opening crawl from Star Wars and you have 20,000 pending updates it’s time for aliases. Turn any complicated command into a short, memorable command quickly and easily with an alias. Launch Firefox with a quickff
, launch Chrome with a simplefu
, do anything any way you want!
Shell scripting is the “gateway” programming language
Shell scripting is easy, fun and rewarding. I know Scratch is a fun toy but when you want to get your feet wet with productive programming that solves actual problems you have right now you gotta try shell scripting. Simple syntax, speedy to write, instant results. It’s the perfect launch pad toward learning any other language.
Looking forward to hearing your excuses to use Terminal/CLI!