GoKawiilI spend more time today than ever before interacting with terminal windows, which is something I don’t think Past Me would have believed in the early ’90s. Back then, poor MS-DOS was the staid whipping boy of the industry, and at least on the consumer side, graphical environments like Windows (and maybe even odder creatures like AmigaOS) seemed poised to stamp the command line into oblivion, leaving text interfaces behind as we all blasted into the ooey-GUI future.
As it turns out, though, the command line is still the best tool for some jobs—many jobs, in fact. I read a wise post some years ago (probably on Slashdot) arguing that a mouse-driven point-and-click interface essentially reduces the user to pointing at something on the screen and grunting, “DO! DO THAT!” at the computer. (The rise of right-click context menus adds the ability for the user to also grunt “MORE THINGS!” but doesn’t otherwise add vocabulary.)
The command line, by contrast, gives the user the opportunity to precisely tell the computer what they want done, using words instead of one or two gestalts that the computer must interpret based on context.
It’s not that you can’t do this kind of thing with a GUI—but it does require changing one’s approach a bit. It’s not that you can’t do this kind of thing with a GUI—but it does require changing one’s approach a bit.
It sounds kind of silly to say it, but the command line is what finally dragged me off Windows as my daily driver back in 2007. At the time, I’d been forced into regular bash usage at work as I took over the day-to-day administration of Boeing Houston’s fleet of then-brand-new EMC Celerra NSX enterprise NAS appliances, and while there were GUI management options available (I am perhaps triggering trauma in a small subset of older readers by saying the words “EMC Control Center”), the environment I’d inherited was firmly held together by bash scripts.