because every additional layer of abstraction disrupts communication with the Machine Spirit even further

Command line is a lot more powerful for a lot of cases. Most CLI programs are written with the idea that the caller might be another program, so they tend to be easy to chain with pipes and redirection. So you have tons of simple tools that you can combine however you need.

Because I prefer using keyboard for almost everything and in most cases terminal is faster than GUI.

For tasks that I know, I’m faster in the terminal. For tasks where I’m less familiar or that are very important (like disk partitioning) I prefer a GUI because with a GUI I can usually see a bit better what I’m doing.

Terminal tasks for me include copying stuff, setting folder permissions, uncompressing or compressing folders, quick edits in vim, etc.

Reproducable actions that do exactly what you expect.

Because you can’t (easily) program gui apps to automate tasks, but combining a few terminal programs to get more complex behaviour is really easy

1. It feels great
2. Terminal programs run on a potato
3. They are almost always way more powerful then their GUI counterparts
4. They integrate with scripts and other tools for unlimited power and flexibility!
5. You feel like a hacker man
6. Your IT literate friends think you are cool
7. You can really do things your own way

So yeah I love using the terminal for almost everything

Because Gui’s don’t show advanced options and so I know/understand exactly what is being done. (e.g. I would always use apt over mint’s package store so I could see what it did, how much time I had left, download multiple applications at once and see if the package made a random config file somewhere)

Only one of the ~250 linux machines I maintain has a gui.

I like using the terminal because of 3 main reasons:

1. I like using my keyboard
2. I like doing multiple things in one window
3. Verbosity

I’m pretty quick with typing, but sometimes I can’t see !y mouse at first, so it’s just faster for me to type out what I want to do as long as I know the right arguments for it.

My average workflow at work as me doing frequent saml logins and going between multiple kinds of databases. It’s just easier for me to run the saml cli command and then run the SQL CLI command I need instead of messing with datagrip settings and stuff. Also I recreationally run some servers and it’s just easier to ssh into the server, make the changes I need in something like nano or the redis CLI tools and then log back out. This means I’m just plain more comfortable on the terminal in certain situations like config editing, writing posts for my gemini capsule, etc.

Sometimes when I run a GUI program I’ll get big loud silence and don’t know what to do. In that case I genuinely enjoy using the terminal and running an equivalent command with verbosity settings so I can see what it’s doing or not and can track down any errors.

On top of those reasons, I’ve been playing with RISC-V architecture lately and, while the xorg riscv64 port is admirable, I just get better performance rn by running my RISC stuff through tty.

I recognize that not everybody is going to have the same use case and workflows as me, but I’m pretty comfortable with what I’ve got 😅

I just think it’s neat!

Terminal is faster when you’re used to it and sometimes offer more customization options to some apps that has both a GUI and TUI/CLI version.

I use the terminal (st with zsh and tmux) for:

• file management (advcpmv, fd, trash-cli, fzf …)
• emails (neomutt)
• text editing/coding (neovim)
• project management (taskjuggler)
• image viewing/organization (ucolla,ge)
• online video browsing (ytfzf)
• calendar (khal)
• ssh
• vpn
• news aggregator (newsboat)
• web, bookmarks manager (buku)
• passwords manager (pass)
• dotfiles manager (stow)
• not in the terminal but I also have a lot of scripts used in rofi to control my audio input/outputs, launch a web search, access my bookmarks, autocomplete username and password fields

I’m sure I’m missing some obvious tools I use daily. It’s hard remember everything when it becomes so natural.

I have shared my experience with some of these tools here.

1. Scripting is easier. Apps and commands can be composed together in simple repeatable scripts.
2. looks cool.
3. Remotely administer machines with the same interface and little lag.

It is quick. it does not need to load a bunch of things and in certain tasks, I can do multiple things at once.

I also find it easier to navigate and edit files with tab to complete.

Because every IDE implementa a different git interface and I can’t be bothered to figure out where they hid the commit, push, pull etc. buttons this time.