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Command Line Tools to Break Your Dependence on the GUI

putorius.net

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Re: Command Line Tools to Break Your Dependence on the GUI

#32

Post by MFogleman »

exergy wrote: post #5

A dictionary? I mean, that's neat and all, but not all that useful is it? I might check the weather once a day, tops. This is better solved by having a widget on my smartphone. Same for the dictionary, and same for short google searches too (Firefox Focus). I had a twinge of hope that this might have been more of an introduction to using the terminal effectively on Linux for diagnoses. I'm new to Linux, and every tim…

Im a big fan of a cli program called tldr[1].

Usually when the internet says "Run these commands", they either don't tell you what they do, or tell you to just check `man`. The problem is that man pages can be super long, can have a somewhat intimidating syntax, and 1,000 flags that arent your flag. Running `tldr program_name` gives you a way simpler manual with common flags and actual examples.

[1]https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr

Re: Command Line Tools to Break Your Dependence on the GUI

#33

Post by tomcooks »

exergy wrote: post #5

A dictionary? I mean, that's neat and all, but not all that useful is it? I might check the weather once a day, tops. This is better solved by having a widget on my smartphone. Same for the dictionary, and same for short google searches too (Firefox Focus). I had a twinge of hope that this might have been more of an introduction to using the terminal effectively on Linux for diagnoses. I'm new to Linux, and every tim…

> I rarely have the faintest idea of what it is that I'm typing in.

I suggest checking out Like Smith's beautifully assembled video guides, whom I think has done a lot for newbies by releasing comprehensible content while minimising the whole RTFM attitude that kept newbies away from the terminal.

But yes, also RTFM.

Re: Command Line Tools to Break Your Dependence on the GUI

#36

Post by Pete_D »

icefog wrote: post #30

I like awk as a calculator: calc () { awk "BEGIN { print "$*" }" } $ calc "2^16" 65536 $ calc "2*16" 32 $ calc "2+16" 18

units, too:

    $ units -t "sqrt(3^2 + 4^2)"
    5
    $ units -t "forty rods per hogshead" "miles per usgallon"
    0.0019825576
    $ units -t "32GB / (1MB/s)" "hours; minutes"
    8;53.333333

Re: Command Line Tools to Break Your Dependence on the GUI

#38

Post by enriquto »

albertzeyer wrote: post #18
csdvrx wrote: post #13

Work in progress, but sixel support may be coming to mainline tmux: git clone git://github.com/tmux/tmux git switch sixel git checkout b1904c9b8db514133d3372aac13b2ff0b2093cc3 This will give you the "placeholder" box for sixels in terminals that do not support sixel (but you should use mlterm on Linux or mintty on Windows) The upcoming feature is to replace this placeholder box by unicode art for the sixels, cf https…

Yes. This (image support in general in Terminal emulators and Terminal multiplexers) is currently being actively discussed here: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/terminal-wg/specifications/is... Many important people are there, e.g. the Tmux maintainer/developer Nicholas Marriott, the Mintty developer, some Xterm.js developer, and others.

I'm not really convinced by the general mindset of ths discussion. What programs need is not to display a "png file" inside the terminal. What you want is to access the individual pixels of a rectangular framebufer using serialized escape sequences. That way you can intetact with the images.

Re: Command Line Tools to Break Your Dependence on the GUI

#39

Post by ska »

scroot wrote: post #34
pjmlp wrote: post #17

I love my dependence on the GUI, otherwise would still be stuck using MS-DOS.

"Slide rules to replace your dependence on calculators"

That analogy doesn't hold well though, because calculators were (at least eventually) better at everything a slide rule could do. This article is predicated on the idea that this doesn't hold for CLI->GUI. You may disagree, but it's not obviously false.

Re: Command Line Tools to Break Your Dependence on the GUI

#40

Post by coldtea »

pjmlp wrote: post #17

I love my dependence on the GUI, otherwise would still be stuck using MS-DOS.

Which is neither here, nor there.

It's more like saying "I love my dependence on images, else I would still be stuck using text". Well, text can be more information-dense and efficient than an image or a movie. And similarly, a CLI can be more efficient than a GUI. Depends on the application.

And if the "MS DOS" reference is about release time, well, there are CLI tools that were built far more recently, and are much more modern than many GUI tools people use.

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