11–20 of 45 posts
Something to be said for leaning by immersion.
More like "the terminal challenge." Curses-based programs (like vim, mutt and lynx) still have graphical user interfaces, they just have really shitty graphics. (And that's not a criticism of those programs.) Try spending a week using just ed, mail, and curl. Those are actual command-line programs, not just terminal-based programs. The litmus test is whether they would work with a real paper teletype.
"When I log into my Xenix system with my 110 baud teletype, both vi and Emacs
are just too damn slow. They print useless messages like, ‘C-h for help’ and
‘“foo” File is read only’. So I use the editor that doesn't waste my VALUABLE time.
Ed, man! !man ed"
More like "the terminal challenge." Curses-based programs (like vim, mutt and lynx) still have graphical user interfaces, they just have really shitty graphics. (And that's not a criticism of those programs.) Try spending a week using just ed, mail, and curl. Those are actual command-line programs, not just terminal-based programs. The litmus test is whether they would work with a real paper teletype.
I'd say the keyboard-centricness still separates them from, say, Eclipse.
More like "the terminal challenge." Curses-based programs (like vim, mutt and lynx) still have graphical user interfaces, they just have really shitty graphics. (And that's not a criticism of those programs.) Try spending a week using just ed, mail, and curl. Those are actual command-line programs, not just terminal-based programs. The litmus test is whether they would work with a real paper teletype.
Curses-based programs (like vim, mutt and lynx) still have graphical user interfaces, they just have really shitty graphics. (And that's not a criticism of those programs.) I'd say the keyboard-centricness still separates them from, say, Eclipse.
Also, I'm annoyed at other commenters' equating "command line" with primitive: just because GUIs are newer does not mean they are superior or that the command line is obsolete! For a large range of tasks like file management or system administration it is actually superior; for quite a lot of other things it's completely usable. I'm not saying GUIs are useless or that the command line is perfect for everything, but it is far from obsolete or inferior.
Now, doing everything in a terminal is overkill, which is why this is a challenge--you're not expected to use a terminal forever, just long enough to get sufficiently acquainted with it so that when you do things the terminal is great at--which you will--you will be able to use it as efficiently as possible. And, since all the readers here doubtlessly spend very large amounts of time behind a computer, being as efficient as possible there should be a priority.
Coincidentally, I say all this as somebody who started using a computer with Windows 95. I only learned how to use the command line (first a bit on Windows then on Linux) because it looked cool; I continue using it because it turned out to be more efficient at a whole host of tasks than using a GUI.
IMHO, bigotry is not only bad in politics. We have to embrace the change, learn new tools, improve, share our knowledge and not only make our jobs better for ourselves, but also for others. Especially for rookies, who will have to be doing more tomorrow than what we do today. I don't believe `libcaca` has anything to serve this purpose.
Using mutt instead of gmail; I'd ask "Why?". We don't need to stick with the tools we've used 10 years ago. If I'd be looking for a challenge as a sysadmin, I'd learn ways to better utilize cloud environments, look for better ways to serve static content for large volume systems, improve my tool base for managing geographically distributed servers, learn about the requirements of the new era of real time web, how to deploy node.js on my servers, etc.
Both have their place.
More like "the terminal challenge." Curses-based programs (like vim, mutt and lynx) still have graphical user interfaces, they just have really shitty graphics. (And that's not a criticism of those programs.) Try spending a week using just ed, mail, and curl. Those are actual command-line programs, not just terminal-based programs. The litmus test is whether they would work with a real paper teletype.
Curses-based programs (like vim, mutt and lynx) still have graphical user interfaces, they just have really shitty graphics. (And that's not a criticism of those programs.) I'd say the keyboard-centricness still separates them from, say, Eclipse.