Linux

I find sometimes the gui takes a while to manipulate say 300 folders. Like if I want to move all the mp4 files from a folder structure into another directory but leave everything else you can use something like

find /path/to/piracy/directory/ -name '*.mp4' -exec cp -r {} /path/to/piracy/storage/ \;

And it'll send em on over.

And I didn't remember that command, I had it in a script, so to find it to post here I just typed:

cat ~/Documents/scripts/scriptname/

And hit enter, and it gave me the info in the file. Tbh it was even easier than that, with tab completion I just had to type:

cat Doc[tab]/sc[tab]/sc[tab]

But back to the piracy, then to delete everything left over from that first script (like .nfo files) just

cd ~/piracy/directory/
rm -r *
exit

And will remove everything instantly.

To make it easier you can make a script with the first command, even chain it with the same for avi etc, and you could probably have it auto clean the source directory afterwards, but I like to do that manually. You can also (in most piracy programs) tell it to run a script on complete, so you could have that all automated by that process (if you don't store them in an external drive like me.) And you can get way fancier with it too, I'm very much still learning, there's way more that can be done pretty easily. I do still use the GUI sometimes too though and for some stuff it is easier, it's definitely not an all or nothing thing, both is better!

Also I'm totally not a pirate that was just an example...cough cough.

Oh, right now I'm sure that it is way easier to use the mouse, because most people have been practicing using the mouse and a GUI for years and years. Once you've had practice with the terminal and autocomplete you can do most tasks fast far quicker.

Staring at this browser, see how long it would take you to grab your mouse, click the file explorer, navigate to /etc/, and then locate and open the fstab file (there are over 100 files and directories in this directory). 10 seconds? 15?

I'm using a terminal called yakuake and it's bound to F12. So if I press F12, a terminal window slides down in the top middle of my screen. It's always on top as long as it is visible so nothing can take focus away. To do the same task I press: F12, type "cat /et" "fs" . If I wanted to edit it, I'd type nvim instead of cat. If I wanted to copy it somewhere I'd type cp instead of cat and then press, at the end of the previous command: "./pro".

If it's a command that I've typed before, I can press CTRL+R in the terminal and it will open a search of my terminal command history. I can start typing part of the command and the search results will show me the top 25 commands that (fuzzy) matches what I've typed, I can press up and down to select the command I'm after, enter to put it into the command line.

Once you're in the mindset of thinking about problems from a terminal point of view there are a lot of useful applications. If you'd rather move files in a GUI-like experience (a TUI) you can use nnn, a TUI file manager. Still have to use a mouse to change music? Run mpd and ncmpcpp. nvim gives you a text editor, tmux the ability to open multiple terminal sessions inside of the terminal.

Much like switching to Linux from Windows, it takes a bit of learning initially but that little bit of learning will pay dividends.