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I have to concatenate off reports for part of work duties. The GUI tools in Adobe or other PDF editors are slow.
The solution was add Linux WSL2 in Windows. And use qpdf
I can now just open the Linux terminal, type qpdf --pages File1.pdf 1-z File2.off 1-z (etc) -- Outputfile.pdf
It is instantly concatenated.
And next report time its just grabbing command from history and editing file name or page numbers needed
You can take my terminal when you can pry it from my cold, dead, hands.
Any one-liner you put together, you can re-run trivially. You can rerun it with modifications trivially. You can wrap it in a for loop that runs it with different parameters trivially. You can stick it in a file and make a reusable Bash script. It's far easier to show someone else how you did it (just copy/paste the text of your terminal session) than dozens of screenshots of a point-and-click adventure (and not in a good way) GUI app. Bash commands are easier over SSH than GUI apps over RDP or VNC or whatever. You can't script a GUI app.
I seriously find myself wondering why someone would use a GUI for something they can do with a terminal. Learning curve is the only reason I can think of.
I frequently find myself creating tools that let me do with a terminal what I formerly could only do with a GUI tool.
While this feels like bait, I'm going to take it. Yes, there is a huge benefit to learning and using a terminal if you use a computer as a tool for creating and working instead of passively consuming entertainment. Organizing and searching files of any sort, building applications, writing without distraction, working with remote devices, and just generally using your computer as a tool instead of a fancy TV are all made easier, faster and more efficient if you can use a terminal. The unix philosophy gives you the ability to do things by stringing together a few commands that you might have to find a specialized program for, if it even exists in GUI land.
That's not to say the GUI's aren't great for a lot of things. They are! But they also lock you into doing things in a few predetermined ways rather than letting you develop the skills and techniques for exploring new spaces.
I cant tell if you are trolling or being serious. Either way, you can take my terminal when you pry it from my cold dead hands.
Nono, im not trolling! Actually was just wanting to see people's reasoning
So curiously I just did a post on realizing I could move some files around and realize it was quicker in the terminal. Basically I had a bunch of files in a folder and I needed to make some sub folders and move the files into them. The difference is not massive but its, to me, a bit easier in the terminal. mkdir "directoryname" instead of click new folder folder name. then like looking at a large amount of files with ls is sorta easier. ls -l resume then mv resume to ./jobs . In the gui I have to hunt around to multi select with shift and ctrl and pull them over. It likely does not sound easier but it is. terminal to is something that the more you use the easier it is doing things with it. Like using the mouse a lot does not make you quicker appreciably and moving or renaming or whatever but if you use the terminal more you do get appreciably faster. Im not even sure of the limit as I have never gotten that good but like I had a boss that could edit files so quickly in vi it was just nuts. since deleting lines is two keystrokes and repeating multiplines is even easier with no need to select. He was also crazy good with grep. Im going to make it a point of having the terminal up and think about using it before gui and then going to gui when I think it will be faster. Its kinda good for you when your in tech to. I hope to get back to my old better pace or better.
multi select with shift and control
There are cases where manually-selecting from a list of files to perform an operation on is desirable, but there are ways to do so in a terminal. Myself, I'd use dired on emacs: hit C-x d and select the directory in question, then tag the items you want (various tools to do this, but m will mark the current item) and then ! to invoke a specified command on all of them.
There are other terminal file managers out there including Orthodox File Manager-type programs like Midnight Commander and others like ranger. I don't use those, but I'm sure that they have similar "manually build set of files to perform operation on" functionality.
For me the most important aspects of terminal commands is that (1) you are forced to learn how your OS really works and (2) the terminal will always be able to do things that your GUI isn't programmed to do.
For example, I use brew commands to install brew packages on bazzite because there is no GUI frontend available. I also use it to start ollama LLMs on my machine even though there is a GUI frontend available, because I don't need a frontend for two commands.
Here's a repost of another comment I made not long ago of things you can do in the terminal:
Listen to music:
Read the news
Download Linux ISOs
Browse the interwebs
Listen to podcasts
As others have mentioned on the fly scripting is something I could never do without. Batch renaming with a quick loop, regex searches, parsing webpages, etc. It's so much faster than trying to find a program to do what I want, that probably won't do it exactly like I want.
The GUIs are nice, sometimes, especially for visual things. (Selecting an image, color, etc.) The terminal remains extremely powerful though in that it's much closer to the object, as it were. If you want to, say, change a setting on your personal machine, as long as the GUI designer thought that option should be included in the GUI (because including every possible setting gets very large and unwieldy very quickly) you're fine. But if you want to adjust that setting on 5, 10, 100 machines, that 30 second trip to the settings app turns into lots of work. If you want to set a setting that the GUI designer didn't decide to include, you're stuck. If you want to have an explanation of what you are doing, or what that other setting might do, terminal has man pages. GUI might have tooltips or a crowdsourced explanation.
depends on what you want to do with your computer? If you want to deeply get into the internals of your computer, including writing your own software, then you'll probably have to touch the terminal at some point. If all you want to do is web browsing or photo editing or something, then you might never need it.
My mate installed Linux Mint the other week. (Yay) I don't know how Mint is different from Bazzite, or what file manager he is using, but I know enough terminal to show him how to mount his old hard drive and save some files from his windows partition.
My mate installed Linux Mint the other week. (Yay) I don't know how Mint is different from Bazzite
Bazzite is Fedora based whereas Linux Mint is Debian based, BASH is a pretty universal language so most commands will be interchangeable however, you two have entirely different package managers so installing software will be different.
Also Bazzite is immutable so if I’m not mistaken changes to system files like /etc/bash.bashrc will not persist for you upon updates whereas on Linux Mint it will always remain the same regardless of updates, this may not be the greatest example because when I upgraded from Debian 12 to 13 I was asked if I wanted to keep the file the same or if I wanted to use the package maintainers version, but I think I got the idea across.
I rarely use powershell or cmd in Windows because they’re just terrible. I’m never sure how I’m supposed to do things with powershell. Documentation online rarely help me. I end up always installing WLS to have a decent experience (before WSL it was Cygwin, CMDer, Msys, etc.)
In Linux it’s so good I’m almost always having a few terminal windows open. I’m mostly using it for text processing. For example, check how often a specific keyword is used among 1GB of files. I can easily string a chain of commands together, and get a result within seconds.
I’m not sure how else I’d configure the servers and networking equipment I’d use, and I have no idea how I’d deal with Kubernetes cluster management without CLIs. I haven’t used Windows in ~15 years but going back to its GUI all the time? Fuck that.
When I would develop on windows I used the terminal a lot and it's not really changing. Guis are great for something's but when you're working with things that have to run without a gui, there's just no substitute to a terminal. I'm not using a terminal cause it makes me feel cool. It's just the only tool for some jobs. Not because a GUI hasn't been made, but because a purpose made GUI for the task would be a waste of time and not as good.
On Windows, I used to install stuff using winget install whatever.
Waiting for the MS Store to load was a freaking anxiety needle injected into my veins. Unacceptable.
Bazaar on the other hand, it's glorious. Blazing fast. So, I go with a GUI.
Also, there are tools like pandoc, ghostscript, caddy, imagemagick, and a gazillion others that are very powerful and quicker to do their job than waiting for a GUI to load.
And then, sometimes, there's just no other way. Maybe it's part of installing or updating something, or stuff like that. But a casual will either wait for a GUI, or just not do that.
I don't think using the terminal is aspirational, it's practical and it's value is clear.
I don't use the terminal often (outside my job where I'm using git commands or launching code) but when I use it it's generally for things that are almost impossible with gui. Troubleshooting network issues or boot issues or searching for files. Fuck, sometimes I can't even get to a folder I know is on my computer without a terminal.
It makes sense for scripting. You can build a process in a file to share among yourself and various devices or with friends to do a certain task on an automated basis.
Even on Windows this is useful to schedule a task in Task Scheduler.
Maybe every Monday, you want your computer to restart. A really quick and basic bash could be written to “shutdown /r /t 0” I can’t remember the exact command and then that file gets executed in Task Scheduler at the specific time you want.
There are other uses like having a file set to rename files. I do this often for my Plex server because I like a specific naming convention on multiple files and to do it quickly.
It’s nicer than GUI because everything can be laid out for you in a manual as to what you need as simple commands and much easier to guide someone because it’s not “click to the far right, no not the side of the screen, but slightly far right and then click this icon that looks like a pineapple but is actually a microphone and then click the icon…” Whereas a command line is just “type in shutdown and then enter y when prompted” and “these are all the available commands and what they do”.
I will say GUIs are nicer for hiding Easter eggs, but also a few devs seem to enjoy making useful features like Easter eggs where I am just now finding out that a button to the far left of the screen has existed and does this useful function. I don’t have that issue in command line tools that have even the most basic documentation.
All day everyday. Why click through a GUI when I can slam out a command in 1/4 of the time to see what my resources or doing, or if something is acting weird. Watching logs tail in a terminal is always going to be faster and smoother than GUI as well. Debugging things as well.
Its a window into the actual internals of the machine. I would say yes, its one of hte many ways linux sets itself way from Windows. And its VERY lightweight. Some linux distros dont need it, some do.
Heck even MacOS has a terminal app. Just because
yes, it's faster. I use neovim and doom emacs so all my navigation is vim style. Therefore I absolutely hate using a mouse now and I find navigating a gui a chore. I mean like unzipping a file is easier, copy and pasting is easier, making a file, directory, whatever it's just faster via a terminal.
There are only a couple of things that I like a gui more than the terminal.
There's a sweet spot between CLI and GUI: TUI.