I know we all enjoy being nerds and using commands (H4ckerman). But now that everything is either a gui or web based, is there really any use to terminal commands?
For example, on windows I never used powershell or cmd hardly ever. I realize now I probably could have. But Linux just drives me to use it more, which i like anyway (because let’s be honest, it makes us feel superior)
Could you elaborate ?
I’ve always wanted to get into coding but what ive watched/read on something like godot or VBA was all clicking certain boxes in the gui and didnt interest me much. Are you saying like python and scripts ? That makes sense. I have no clue what programmers actually do since ive never been able to find something to apply it to
Clicking? I spend most of my time typing. Even in Labview there’s some typing to do. And godot requires a substantial amount of code to go with the gui side, it just has its own text editor.
But I mostly mod games these days, and I frequently need to understand the terminal api that’s being used to gather and use resources because the vscode gui fails to get things set up on its own a lot. I use the terminal directly less these days. But I still interact with it daily. Heck, I even use terminal args in steam game launching to improve performance occasionally.
I mostly use the terminal for automation though. And ffmpeg.
I wrote a program at work that gets deployed to hundreds of thousands of systems and is very hard to fully test or instrument. This program recently had a bug that was hard to track down. Using the command line, I connected to one of these boxes over ssh and ran a series of commands to detect the bug and dump details of what happened. Then, I took all those commands and turned them into a onliner that I could pass in over ssh, so I could get everything I needed for an individual maxhine. I then used
xargsto run that command in parallel over every single one of the systems my code was running on and in the end, I was left with a nice directory of files whose name was the IP of an affected system, each filled with useful information. I started by manually running command over ssh, but the composable nature of the shell allowed me to transition that into a script in a matter of minutes.I provided a more residential example of why I exclusively use the terminal for file management in a different top level comment.