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I often wonder if I would have been able to achieve command-line fluency if I had been born 10 years later. GUIs just weren’t a thing when I was learning compu

I often wonder if I would have been able to achieve command-line fluency if I had been born 10 years later. GUIs just weren’t a thing when I was learning computers, so I had no choice but to learn to work on the command line. I can tell that it was time well spent now - I can script solutions to things that GUI-only folks sometimes spend hours repetitively doing “by hand”, but it took years to get to that point. I can’t entirely blame somebody for giving up and saying, “meh, the ‘long way’ is good enough”.

asdff 7y ago
I'm considering going on a GUI cleanse and working command line only for a while to build my chops. Bold idea, or absolutely insane?
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  Probably insane, but if we were sane we wouldn’t be programmers, would we? ; ) I actually sometimes develop Java apps entirely on the command line using only shell scripts (no maven or gradle), so I have to download all the dependencies and resolve all the transitive dependencies myself. It’s a bit time consuming, but I end up discovering a lot of intricacies of some of the libraries I work with that I would never have come across otherwise. You can even debug using jdb, although at times System.out.println is less painful.
- dTal 7y ago
  It's perfectly possible, and not that insane. Much more possible than most people likely think. The primary pain point is mostly web browsing - for a long time Elinks was the only halfway-viable web browser, and it has a lot of pain points. But maybe brow.sh is better these days - I've never tried it (although, arguably, running Firefox through a shoddy GUI inside a terminal doesn't really count as a "GUI cleanse".) It's worth doing, purely for the enlightenment of freeing you from the busted, "macho" notion that a GUI is inferior to a command line. GUIs are awesome.

asdff 7y ago

I'm considering going on a GUI cleanse and working command line only for a while to build my chops. Bold idea, or absolutely insane?

commandlinefan 7y ago
Probably insane, but if we were sane we wouldn’t be programmers, would we? ; ) I actually sometimes develop Java apps entirely on the command line using only shell scripts (no maven or gradle), so I have to download all the dependencies and resolve all the transitive dependencies myself. It’s a bit time consuming, but I end up discovering a lot of intricacies of some of the libraries I work with that I would never have come across otherwise. You can even debug using jdb, although at times System.out.println is less painful.
dTal 7y ago
It's perfectly possible, and not that insane. Much more possible than most people likely think. The primary pain point is mostly web browsing - for a long time Elinks was the only halfway-viable web browser, and it has a lot of pain points. But maybe brow.sh is better these days - I've never tried it (although, arguably, running Firefox through a shoddy GUI inside a terminal doesn't really count as a "GUI cleanse".) It's worth doing, purely for the enlightenment of freeing you from the busted, "macho" notion that a GUI is inferior to a command line. GUIs are awesome.