Comment on What helps people get comfortable on the command line?
philluminati@programming.dev 1 year ago
Ultimately it helps to understand the benefit of the command line: That text is a more effective mechansim for communicating that anything else. That any command you learn can easily to turned into a script an automated. That commands can be copied and pasted and shared with friends much easier than videos or images.
Look at the explanation in Windows for how to change a registry key or how to change a printer setting. It’s one long guide full of screenshots thats painful to follow or understand. Where-as Linux users can easily share commands and fixes or tests over a simple irc chat, because the command line reaches the whole system.
The command line is of course a place where lots of apps can be plugged together and mixed up to achieve hundreds of goals. awk, grep, sed, wc can all be mixed together so counting users on the system. At this point in my answer I realise I am just regurgitating things written on thousands of webpages on the internet!
Redkey@programming.dev 1 year ago
I agree with most of what you said, except for the Windows examples. The pages that you linked begin with three-line TL;DRs that are enough for any barely-competent user to find and modify the necessary settings. While the full instructions may be tortuously detailed, are they actually hard to understand?
And sure, those Windows pages don’t advance the user’s knowledge in any meaningful way, but neither does blindly copying and pasting a line of shell commands.
By the way, while I appreciate that we’re talking about if and how CLI is superior to GUI, and not Linux versus Windows…