this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2025
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Does Terminal use actually make sense in the real world? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works to c/linux@lemmy.world
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I know we all enjoy being nerds and using commands (H4ckerman). But now that everything is either a gui or web based, is there really any use to terminal commands?

For example, on windows I never used powershell or cmd hardly ever. I realize now I probably could have. But Linux just drives me to use it more, which i like anyway (because let's be honest, it makes us feel superior)

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[–] Badabinski@kbin.earth 6 points 3 days ago

My work and personal computers typically have two applications open—a web browser and a terminal (well, really a shitload of terminals). I don't have a desktop, I have a terminal. I don't have a graphical file manager, I have a terminal. I'm not doing this because it's cool, I do it because it's efficient as all fuck and makes it trivial to fire off one-liners to automate shit.

Like, I stream a certain video game competitively, and I need to keep recordings if I want to submit runs. I started off recording my gameplay using x264, and the file sizes were too damn big. I tested various av1 options out using ffmpeg on a small sample clip, and when I was done it was simplicity itself to just do this:

# I'm typing this on my phone so I'm not going to write out the ffmpeg args
for file in recordings/*.mp4; do ffmpeg "${some_args[@]}"; done

I didn't have to learn some stupid GUI batch processing thing. I didn't have to install any extra tools (since I already had ffmpeg). I just took my command, substituted the input and output files for variable names, and looped that shit.

I feel that the command line is the most efficient interface for a huge number of tasks. Discoverability is awful (although improved with good tab completion and just reading the fucking manual), but the efficiency and composability of a CLI built in the Unix tradition is hard to overstate imo.