8 ms·

Life on the Command Line

177 points by telemachos 15y ago

danohuiginn 15y ago
One thing I've never found is a decent spreadsheet program that'll run in curses. Otherwise, terminal + browser gets me through 90% of the day.
- 4ad 15y ago
  I do all the things one might use a spreadsheet for in awk :-). One might say it's slower then a spreadsheet. I don't know. I can type an one liner awk summation/average, faster then it takes OpenOffice to load. This is to me the most common spreadsheet operation. For more complex task, I feel that I'm working faster in awk (it's a full blown high level programming language, after all). I'm not sure it it's actually faster or if it's only my opinion though. I'm happy with this setup.
  - rufibarbatus 15y ago
    Financial consultant here. I use Haskell for this kind of thing. In the event that I need a visual prototype to work with, together with a client or business partner, I don't think it's all that horrible to prototype something in Excel, and later port it to Haskell if necessary. But that's of course because I already, at some point, reinvented the wheel to make this possible. So now I'm mostly just reusing code which I already have available.
    - 4ad 15y ago
      Awk makes it trivially easy to parse text. How does Haskell handle this parsing task? I am curious because I've always wanted to learn Haskell, mainly because of its lazy evaluation, but hadn't had the time yet. Hope to do it soon.
      - rufibarbatus 15y ago
        Out of the box, it might not be the most intuitive text parsing tool indeed. It's trivial, but not immediately intuitive. That said: strings are lists of chars, and Haskell is strong at pattern matching (esp within lists) in a bunch of different ways, so trivial text parsing tasks are trivial and intuitive in Haskell. For anything slightly more complex, there are regular expression and enumerating libraries which can do the job alright (and efficiently if I may say so). EDIT: I'm sorry, can you give me an example of a problem so I can give you an example of a solution? :-)
    - zobzu 15y ago
      im using python for this. just cause its simple and it just works.
- keeperofdakeys 15y ago
  From what I have used of lotus123, it was quite a decent program. I'm sure you could find a lotus-inspired program somewhere.
  - danohuiginn 15y ago
    Thanks for the tip. MacroCalc seems to fit the bill - http://www.freakout.de/#mc http://www.freakout.de/#mc [haven't tried it yet]
- chimeracoder 15y ago
  Personally, I use R. Importing and exporting CSV files in R is trivially easy (it's what it's made for, after all). Doing transformations on an entire column or row at a time is also very simple. Import a csv, then take the logarithm of one column and plot that against some transformation of another column? No problem - two lines in R, and still highly readable.
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- icebraining 15y ago
  Possibly Oleo[1] or Teapot[2]? [1]: http://www.gnu.org/software/oleo/ http://www.gnu.org/software/oleo/ [2]: http://www.syntax-k.de/projekte/teapot/ http://www.syntax-k.de/projekte/teapot/
- deleted 15y ago
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- access_denied 15y ago
  emacs has at least 2 of them that work
- RexRollman 15y ago
  There is always SC. And of course, Google Docs exists.
- lloeki 15y ago
  I end up using Python. In the end it's much more powerful and less error-prone (the oops factor of spreadsheet apps is ginormous). Quality plot, graph and stat modules abound. Plus it has the advantage of being able to trivially scale in any direction, like refactoring or working on a real database (sqlite) when the dataset grows instead of shoehorning a database into a sheet, or making a module out of it, or integrating it with other random tools.
Kwpolska 15y ago
I resigned from a terminal IM client, because it made me less productive than a GUI client. Additionally, some features were annoying. > Type pine or mutt (for example), and your mail is before your eyes in the time it takes a graphical user to move their mouse to the envelope icon. Type q, and it’s gone. Not quite. I need to wait for "fetching message headers". It takes a while. mutt and IMAP.
- sp332 15y ago
  I thought you would use (e.g.) sendmail to get the mail from the server to your local inbox, and then use pine or mutt to manage them?
  - deleted 15y ago
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- anonymous 15y ago
  set header_cache="~/.mutt/hcache" I have more than 10k emails sitting in my inbox and with this option mutt loads the headers in around one second (over the Internet). And of course I could fetch all the emails in the background and use mutt locally, but I didn't bother yet.
- icebraining 15y ago
  >I resigned from a terminal IM client, because it made me less productive than a GUI client. Additionally, some features were annoying. Using mibbit or bitlbee with an IRC client works for me. EDIT: Not mibbit, I meant minbif (http://minbif.im/ http://minbif.im/)
  - vae77 15y ago
    + 1 on bitlbee. I use it with weechat-curses.
- sramsay 15y ago
  IM was one of the last graphical applications to go for me (I'm the author of the article). I had the same problem until I discovered bsflite (http://bsflite.sourceforge.net/ http://bsflite.sourceforge.net/).
Auguste 15y ago
I've found myself using console applications more and more recently. The only GUI applications I use out of necessity are Firefox, Keepass and VirtualBox. I use the console for everything else: Cmus for music, Newsbeuter for news feeds and podcasts, TaskWarrior for to-do management, Vim for coding, etc. The Ratpoison window manager helps me make the most of screen space and allows me to manage my windows with keyboard commands like GNU Screen. Unfortunately, I've never found an email client I liked, whether console or GUI, so I just stick to Fastmail's web interface.
- joelhaasnoot 15y ago
  VirtualBox does have a command line interface. You can start up headless images and such pretty easily. You could even start images with a VNC server, and control the machine from your browser. One less visual tool.
  - mise 15y ago
    And I wonder if KeePassX has a CLI. Its GUI current form is clunky.
  - Auguste 15y ago
    Oh, I should clarify, I don't use it as a server or anything like that. I have VirtualBox and a Windows XP image for any University work that requires Windows software. Right now that's, reluctantly, Microsoft Visual Studio.
- RexRollman 15y ago
  That's me right here. I love Ratpoison, although I think Evilwm is really good as well. I never liked e-mail in Unix, as I feel the whole MUA/MTA thing is too complicated, so I stick with Gmail (which I backup with Fetchmail to a mbox file).
  - adimitrov 15y ago
    There's a problem with that, though: fetchmail won't notice state changes in your mailbox — like, whether an email is read or not, whether you've replied, forwarded it already, etc. That's why I came to despise the MUA/MTA schism of Unix so much: If I reply to an email on my laptop, I won't know it on my desktop. The only solution is to have a central server you can ssh into. Clunky solution at best. Solution: use Mutt's semi-new IMAP interface. Nothing is stored locally, and I can see whether I've replied to emails, and I can delete/move emails regardless of the computer I'm currently on.
mise 15y ago
Discovering Ctrl+r (for searching through past commands) was a big jump for me in CLI usability.
- ordinary 15y ago
  You'll also like this little bit I yanked from my .inputrc: # By default up/down are bound to previous-history and next-history, # respectively. The following does the same but gives the extra functionality # where if you type any text (or more accurately, if there is any text between # the start of the line and the cursor), the subset of the history starting with # that text is searched. "\C-p": history-search-backward "\C-n": history-search-forward
  - telemachos 15y ago
    Discovering that you could so such things in .inputrc was a big lightbulb moment for me. # not relevant on osx #$include /etc/inputrc $if Bash # append a '/' to show a dir is a dir set mark-directories on set mark-symlinked-directories on # no audible or visual bell set bell-style none # use ls -F style highlights for completion set visible-stats on # go right to showing multiple options set show-all-if-ambiguous on # ctrl-p cycles through options "\C-p": menu-complete "\C-x\C-x": exchange-point-and-mark "\ew": copy-region-as-kill # easier back and forth by word "\C-b": backward-word "\eb": backward-char "\C-f": forward-word "\ef": forward-char $endif # Two silly macros # # Insert double quotes & set cursor between them "\C-x\"": "\"\"\eb" # # Insert single quotes & set cursor between them "\C-x'": "''\eb"
    - lloeki 15y ago
      I did not know you could put conditions in inputrc. Useful.
      - telemachos 15y ago
        I haven't gone to much further with it, but it is very handy: http://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/readline/readline.html#SEC11 http://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/readline/readline.html#SEC11
planckscnst 15y ago
Being able to script a program is amazingly powerful, but I find the reason I like terminal-based programs is primarily due to the interface. The interface of a terminal program (both command-line and interactive) is the keyboard, which is a vastly superior input mechanism than the mouse for most things. Any thought that goes into the interface of a terminal-based program goes toward the keyboard interaction; there isn't a GUI to think about. Because of this, terminal-based interfaces are usually much better than any graphical application.
chimeracoder 15y ago
I completely agree with this, and I'm glad that somebody's writing a series on how to be productive on the command line. I find Neal Stephenson's 'In The Beginning Was the Command Line' to be a nice overview of why GUIs became the dominant paradigm over the CLI. I understand the desire to be 'user-friendly' to less tech-savvy people, but it's a real shame that we've equated 'functional' with 'has a good-looking graphical front-end'. Even a few weeks after I began using the CLI (almost) exclusively, I couldn't imagine going back.
craftsman 15y ago
Last year I decided to get back to basics and to dive into using emacs for as many things as possible. It's been extremely difficult and disorienting at times, but it has a non-quantifiable "feels right" quality to it. I now find myself trying to do as many things as possible in emacs, but emacs + terminal + browser is extremely powerful. I'm not yet to the point of running a shell (elisp shell or otherwise) in emacs, but this troika is very powerful, and I'm extremely happy with it.
- zobzu 15y ago
  supress emacs and itll feel right Sent from my VIM.
- rimmjob 15y ago
  what programs do you use to do things that emacs cant?
  - omaranto 15y ago
    That, of course, depends on what you use your computer for, but in my case there are very few programs I don't run inside Emacs: a browser, a pdf and djvu viewer, Mathematica, and a media player. I do use other programs, but mostly run them within Emacs (they're LaTeX, several compilers and interpreters, and a shell).
deleted 15y ago
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Luuucas 15y ago
nice example for living the command line idea: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/instantfox/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/instantfox/
- danohuiginn 15y ago
  I prefer http://yubnub.org/ http://yubnub.org/. Yubnub also calls itself 'a command line for the web', but manages that without requiring an add-on
- burgerbrain 15y ago
  You can do that yourself what whatever site you wish by right-clicking on the search bar on any site an selecting "add keyword for this item".
zdw 15y ago
The fundamental part of this isn't the CLI/GUI conflict, IMO, it's this paragraph: For now, I just want to make the point that once you move to the command line, everything is trivially connected to everything else, and so you are mostly freed from being locked in to any particular type of tool The problem is people building standalone systems that aren't integrated with the whole. For example, most people's primary text editing environment doesn't carry over to their browser, or many GUI cases, their email program. Solve this problem and the rest of the issues wouldn't be so severe.
- palish 15y ago
  I often write emails in Vim, then ggSHIFT-vSHIFT-g"+yALT-TAB CTRL-vTAB ENTER. And that, my friend, is modern day integration between gVim and GMail on Windows.
  - astine 15y ago
    Had you used mutt instead of Gmail, you would have simply used: SHIFT-zSHIFT-z. When you want to compose mail in one of these programs, it opens your specified text editor and uses the whatever text you enter as the contents of your message. It works a lot like the 'Intents' feature which has been Android has received so much praise for, only it's decades old. Actually, there's no reason for this to depend on the cli. In Firefox, there are plugins which give you a button to click under every text box which open your favorite text editor with a buffer already open containing the contents of the text box. Edit the buffer and save, and your changed appear in the text box. (This is, in fact, how I am editing this comment.) On Unix systems, a graphical mail program could easily use a shell call to get text from an external program. The only problem is, this just doesn't really happen. Vendors prefer proprietary interop with their own products rather than more universal interop methods.
  - gmac 15y ago
    I'm not sure if you're saying that this shows the problem to be solved, or that it shows just how unsolved the problem is...
    - 15y ago
gue5t 15y ago
The biggest issue I have with the text-manipulation capabilities of the CLI is the inability to select text in the prompt with the keyboard. Shift+navigation buttons is standard to do this in GUI text boxes, but the CLI's slightly different notion of the cursor (box v. line caret) comes with the inability to select text keyboardly. How do others solve this problem? Are there e.g. readline replacements that have this capability?
- slug 15y ago
  Besides using yank/paste keyboard shortcuts, you can always use screen or tmux copy mode. If you need the output of a command sent to the clipboard, there's several ways, xclip is one of them.
- j-kidd 15y ago
  This is why X allows you to copy text by highlighting it, and to paste text by middle clicking. The problem was solved a long time ago. Just grab the mouse and stop being a keyboard elitist.
- dredmorbius 15y ago
  aptitude install xclip I map 'xc' to 'xclip' and 'xp' to 'xclip -o' (paste) with shell scripts. Copy to/from clipboard via pipes. Though X11 copy/paste works pretty well also. There are the odd occasions where a mouse is the right tool for the job.
emanuer 15y ago
This is definitely the wrong crowed to present following facts, but I feel it might enrich the conversation. <Quote> ...but I’ve seldom heard a usability expert end a discourse on human factors by acknowledging that graphical systems are only really the “best” solution for a certain group of people or a particular set of tasks. Most take the graphical desktop as ground truth – it’s just the way we do things. </Quote> The Human brain has estimated 2 billions nerves in the V1 & V2 region. Those regions are responsible for rudimentary visual recognition, of objects with different: Form (grouping, orientation, size), Color, Motion, Spatial position. This is one of the most powerful parallel computational systems known to men. It takes humans about 10 milliseconds to recognize an object standing out in those respects (e.g. gray text and one red word). Why am I putting this down? / What are GUI's good for: scan 1.3 million pixels (1280*1024 screen) ignore all text fields find all buttons identify a symbolic representation of the task at hand (e.g. save) The whole thing took ~40 milliseconds and most importantly: it is a task done so fast and effortlessly by the human brain, that we don't even think about it. Humans are visual animals, GUI's are a result of our evolutionary history. I am not stating that GUI's are the fastest way to get the job done. You still have to move the mouse, etc. A skilled Command Line user can get the job done without a 40 milliseconds delay and moving the mouse might take longer than typing the command. However, teaching the average person to use a new piece of software is near impossible without utilizing their incredible brain power for visual recognition. Graying a button out, making it red, green,... gives the skilled UX designer the ability to convey a lot of information without making people think.
- jodrellblank 15y ago
  It's not quite right to imply that because a command line isn't graphical it isn't using human visual recognition - we still see CLIs. We still use colour and non-word markup to convey information in CLI programs, such as hashes at the start of lines to indicate headings, or line borders to indicate a 'button', or : to indicate a command, e.g. in VIM. Many of us use it as if it was a hybrid system - a GUI display controlled by keyboard where possible.
- planckscnst 15y ago
  Then why do I spend many seconds trying to find certain buttons that are right in front of me ("Where the hell did that ordered list button go?") and even longer trying to find buttons that aren't even there? Terminal-based programs also do make use of color as well as white space and grouping. They do convey information visually. A primary example of this is `ls -l` (the color option is different on different systems, but is almost always aliased on by default).
richardk 15y ago
gui vs cli, interesting topic. i used to use the command line for everything but recently switched to using guis. switched mainly because gui applications seem nicer to me for completing common desktop tasks, for example listening to music, i can just click the rhythmbox applet and select a song as opposed to something like "mplayer ~/Music/some\ artist/some\ album/*" or manipulating files, it seems a lot nicer to me to be able to pull a file onto my desktop than type out (even with tab-complete) "mv foo ~/Desktop". ofcourse, there are exceptions when using a shell is much easier, for instance if i want to copy a large number of files whose filenames have some similar pattern. it's also very nice to be able to install some new program and just use it, why should i have to read long poorly written man pages? at the same time i still use a shell everyday, but as a programming/administration tool.
- timmy-turner 15y ago
  Same for me. For example, I like using git gui or tortoisehg when doing complex commits as those tools enable me to find, inspect and select all necessary files faster than typing a command for each file/task. For examining recent log entries or switching branches, pushing etc., I prefer the cli. For complex file tasks I use mc, which is a nice hybrid solution between a gui and a bare cli.
  - freedrull 15y ago
    For git, have you tried tig? It has a nice ncurses interface for inspecting commits and doing all sorts of git related things.
- icebraining 15y ago
  For music, you should try a proper music player, like MPD and ncmpcpp. It has a music database, playlists and all that stuff.
  - richardk 15y ago
    out of curiousity, does MPD/ncmpcpp make use of the shell? if it doesn't then i can't see how it'd be advantageous over a gui music player like rhythmbox
smharris65 15y ago
Can any of these command line programs connect to Microsoft Outlook email servers? That's the number one problem: at many work places Outlook is entrenched and the Outlook UI is terribly outdated.
- djeikyb 15y ago
  As long as Exchange is set up with the imap button checked, mutt works great. I don't know of an open source MAPI connector.
  - dredmorbius 15y ago
    I wouldn't say "great" as far as IMAP goes, as Exchange gets horribly confused when there are multiple connections made to it. That said, I find offlineimap is a better tool than mutt's built-in IMAP support.
RexRollman 15y ago
When I am using a Unix based system, there are three graphical programs that I use: X11, Firefox, and Feh. Everything else I do can be accomplished inside of a Xterm.
- pyre 15y ago
  Do you only use mplayer with the aalib -vo option?
  - RexRollman 15y ago
    If you are talking about video, I don't play video on the computer.
killerswan 15y ago
Most of the interesting GUIs today are web sites, which he uses... Anyways, I think icons are overrated, and the text hyperlink rules the universe.
njharman 15y ago
"I find the CLI to be faster, easier to understand, easier to integrate, more scalable, more portable, more sustainable, more consistent, and many, many times more flexible ... that’s a bold series of claims" besides "easier to understand" (which depends on an individual's experience and knowledge) I thought those were pretty much acknowledged / obvious. Not bold at all. no?
kellishaver 15y ago
As someone with a severe visual impairment, I use the command line as much as possible. It's easier to see and there is less I need to see. If I can type a command instead of having to hunt for a button, it means I can work that much faster and anything I'm looking at will be text, uncluttered, and high contrast. From the command line, I can navigate the filesystem, install software, search, edit text, download files, play music, and send email all without even looking at the monitor. Once you're comfortable with it, you can just close your eyes and let your brain and your fingers do all of the work.
rch 15y ago
Every now and then I have similar complaints, but I don't think it boils down to cli vs. gui - the situation is actually far worse. Building high quality productivity tools that are able to exceed the expectations of expert users is both difficult and time consuming... and there is almost zero market incentive to accomplish the task properly for consumer-class applications. [edit] this is not to imply that consumer apps are trivial -- I think I once saw Minsky discuss an early attempt at AI that started by interpreting children's books, thinking that would be easier than understanding journal publications, etc. -- it quickly became clear that the task of parsing a children's story requires an immense store of implicit context and as such, was completely intractable at the time. The challenge of writing 'simple' things like email, text editing, and spreadsheet apps seems related to that.
joeyh 15y ago
I never got into using mh, but have experienced a similar inversion when I switched to mpd, where what was a monolithic interface for playing music was replaced with a broad set of tools that center around the command line. It's exhilarating to enter that kind of environment, I found myself writing dozens of little utilities to control mpd in short order.
kqr2 15y ago
A nice essay on this topic by Neal Stephenson. In the Beginning was the Command Line http://artlung.com/smorgasborg/C_R_Y_P_T_O_N_O_M_I_C_O_N.shtml http://artlung.com/smorgasborg/C_R_Y_P_T_O_N_O_M_I_C_O_N.sht...
- ysangkok 15y ago
  > When Ronald Reagan was a radio announcer, he used to call baseball games by reading the terse descriptions that trickled in over the telegraph wire and were printed out on a paper tape. He would sit there, all by himself in a padded room with a microphone, and the paper tape would eke out of the machine and crawl over the palm of his hand printed with cryptic abbreviations. (...) His listeners, many of whom presumably thought that Reagan was actually at the ballpark watching the game, would reconstruct the scene in their minds according to his descriptions. > This is exactly how the World Wide Web works: the HTML files are the pithy description on the paper tape, and your Web browser is Ronald Reagan. The same is true of Graphical User Interfaces in general.
commandar 15y ago
Unless you keep the app open all the time (I’m assuming you do that because you have the focus of a guided missile), this is a program that you open and close several times a day. So why, oh why, does it take so much time to load? This is why, even though I disagree with many of the things Apple is doing with the OS, I think Apple is on the right track with the app lifecycle model with Lion. Most computers ship with far more memory than people actually use these days; why should you constantly open and close apps when you can just leave them resident? Most of the reason people even bother closing apps anymore has less to do with the resource-juggling that made it necessary in the past, and far more to do with workflow and window management.
- cake 15y ago
  I was confused with this part. People actually open and close their mail client several times a day ? Is it just closing the window or full app quit ? For me and people I know, the mail client is the first app open after boot and it is always "open". It takes me less than 2 sec on my 3 year old computer to display new mail.
  - rch 15y ago
    I only check mail every few hours - when I need a break - and only actively correspond with people at the open or close of business. I don't have an open-door attitude at the office either.
justinhj 15y ago
The key advantages of a command line tool over a gui are power and flexibility. There's any number of ways I can find and filter files using the find command, and then with xargs I can pipe them all through a sequence of simple operations. In a typical gui file manager that kind of stuff is just not possible. The possibility space for what you can do is limited by the visual abstractions the original designer came up with for file manipulation. With command line tools that space is virtually infinite. Often we consider the command line to be for expert users, and consider it our job as system designers to hide it from the rest. But when you consider that most people are able to learn basic calculus at school, a skill that has practical use in real life in only a limited number of professions, why don't we teach people to use the gnu tools at school? A skill that would enable them to use computers in powerful ways for the rest of their lives?
- richardk 15y ago
  "... In a typical gui file manager that kind of stuff is just not possible. The possibility space for what you can do is limited by the visual abstractions the original designer came up with for file manipulation. With command line tools that space is virtually infinite." whilst i certainly agree with this, i would speculate that 80-90% of the average user's time is spent carrying out a handful of simple operations that are better catered for by guis. for the other 10-20% we have our virtually infinite space: the shell.
  - rwl 15y ago
    This, to me, is exactly the problem with most GUIs. If you're spending 80 percent of your time doing a handful of simple, repeatable operations, you might as well be using a typewriter. Programs that force you to work that way are the worst kind of chains.
  - justinhj 15y ago
    But they are limited permanently and may spend hours doing things by hand that could take a moment. A common one is renaming photographs.
- william42 15y ago
jiri 15y ago
Keyboard is ideal for entering data, but GUI is superior to console for data output and visualization. It would be perfect solution if all OS/applications would have command line but with visual output. Instead of "menu" at the top, just command line. There some good modern approaches to this problem, for example gleeBox for control of internet browser is nice way of integration of console style control to GUI application.
enneff 15y ago
Most of the programs he describes aren't CLI programs but programs with a Terminal-based GUI. A real CLI warrior uses sh, ed, and mail. :-)
- sgerrand 15y ago
  Obligatory 'real programmers' links: * http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html * http://xkcd.com/378/ http://xkcd.com/378/
m0hit 15y ago
Tangentially related to post. Don Norman's essay on how command lines are better suited in a graphical world for various reasons. (of course a lot of us here feel this here already). http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/ui_breakthrough-command_line_interfaces.html http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/ui_breakthrough-command_line_inter...
shuwu83 15y ago
A pure CLI is an arbitrary constraint on program design. CLIs and GUIs are not adversaries or mutually exclusive. I see no evidence that designers are opposed to command interfaces given that many of the graphical programs I use incorporate them where appropriate. The world isn't black and white. GUIs can be fast and pointing can be faster than typing. In other cases, a written command is fastest way to get exactly what you want.
jeez 15y ago
a bit off-topic, but IS there a command line music player that works the way he illustrates in the article?
- alexkay 15y ago
  http://cmus.sourceforge.net/ http://cmus.sourceforge.net/
  - officemonkey 15y ago
    I also just found out that "pianobar" is a cli for Pandora.com.
- jesboat 15y ago
  mpd
garron 15y ago
Hi, is there any mirror where I can read the post?, the site seems to be down.
discreteevent 15y ago
Its a pity that he is so absolutely wrong about the bike for one of its main use cases: Traveling a reasonably long distance over terrain that is not perfectly flat. A bad analogy weakens what follows unnecessarily.
jamesrcole 15y ago
As i commented over on that site, I wish we could have the best of both worlds. I'd like a UI that did a really good job of integrating command line and GUI features. Not something that just tacks them together. To do this you'd really have to think through the UI from scratch (and yes, I am interesting in trying this myself, but am currently working on other things). When you think about it, the fact that command-lines are text-only is really just a historical artifact and it's nothing inherent to the notion of command-lines.

177 points by telemachos 15y ago

One thing I've never found is a decent spreadsheet program that'll run in curses. Otherwise, terminal + browser gets me through 90% of the day.

4ad 15y ago
I do all the things one might use a spreadsheet for in awk :-). One might say it's slower then a spreadsheet. I don't know. I can type an one liner awk summation/average, faster then it takes OpenOffice to load. This is to me the most common spreadsheet operation. For more complex task, I feel that I'm working faster in awk (it's a full blown high level programming language, after all). I'm not sure it it's actually faster or if it's only my opinion though. I'm happy with this setup.
- rufibarbatus 15y ago
  Financial consultant here. I use Haskell for this kind of thing. In the event that I need a visual prototype to work with, together with a client or business partner, I don't think it's all that horrible to prototype something in Excel, and later port it to Haskell if necessary. But that's of course because I already, at some point, reinvented the wheel to make this possible. So now I'm mostly just reusing code which I already have available.
  - 4ad 15y ago
    Awk makes it trivially easy to parse text. How does Haskell handle this parsing task? I am curious because I've always wanted to learn Haskell, mainly because of its lazy evaluation, but hadn't had the time yet. Hope to do it soon.
    - rufibarbatus 15y ago
      Out of the box, it might not be the most intuitive text parsing tool indeed. It's trivial, but not immediately intuitive. That said: strings are lists of chars, and Haskell is strong at pattern matching (esp within lists) in a bunch of different ways, so trivial text parsing tasks are trivial and intuitive in Haskell. For anything slightly more complex, there are regular expression and enumerating libraries which can do the job alright (and efficiently if I may say so). EDIT: I'm sorry, can you give me an example of a problem so I can give you an example of a solution? :-)
  - zobzu 15y ago
    im using python for this. just cause its simple and it just works.
keeperofdakeys 15y ago
From what I have used of lotus123, it was quite a decent program. I'm sure you could find a lotus-inspired program somewhere.
- danohuiginn 15y ago
  Thanks for the tip. MacroCalc seems to fit the bill - http://www.freakout.de/#mc http://www.freakout.de/#mc [haven't tried it yet]
chimeracoder 15y ago
Personally, I use R. Importing and exporting CSV files in R is trivially easy (it's what it's made for, after all). Doing transformations on an entire column or row at a time is also very simple. Import a csv, then take the logarithm of one column and plot that against some transformation of another column? No problem - two lines in R, and still highly readable.
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icebraining 15y ago
Possibly Oleo[1] or Teapot[2]? [1]: http://www.gnu.org/software/oleo/ http://www.gnu.org/software/oleo/ [2]: http://www.syntax-k.de/projekte/teapot/ http://www.syntax-k.de/projekte/teapot/
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access_denied 15y ago
emacs has at least 2 of them that work
RexRollman 15y ago
There is always SC. And of course, Google Docs exists.
lloeki 15y ago
I end up using Python. In the end it's much more powerful and less error-prone (the oops factor of spreadsheet apps is ginormous). Quality plot, graph and stat modules abound. Plus it has the advantage of being able to trivially scale in any direction, like refactoring or working on a real database (sqlite) when the dataset grows instead of shoehorning a database into a sheet, or making a module out of it, or integrating it with other random tools.

Kwpolska 15y ago

I resigned from a terminal IM client, because it made me less productive than a GUI client. Additionally, some features were annoying. > Type pine or mutt (for example), and your mail is before your eyes in the time it takes a graphical user to move their mouse to the envelope icon. Type q, and it’s gone. Not quite. I need to wait for "fetching message headers". It takes a while. mutt and IMAP.

sp332 15y ago
I thought you would use (e.g.) sendmail to get the mail from the server to your local inbox, and then use pine or mutt to manage them?
- deleted 15y ago
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anonymous 15y ago
set header_cache="~/.mutt/hcache" I have more than 10k emails sitting in my inbox and with this option mutt loads the headers in around one second (over the Internet). And of course I could fetch all the emails in the background and use mutt locally, but I didn't bother yet.
icebraining 15y ago
>I resigned from a terminal IM client, because it made me less productive than a GUI client. Additionally, some features were annoying. Using mibbit or bitlbee with an IRC client works for me. EDIT: Not mibbit, I meant minbif (http://minbif.im/ http://minbif.im/)
- vae77 15y ago
  + 1 on bitlbee. I use it with weechat-curses.
sramsay 15y ago
IM was one of the last graphical applications to go for me (I'm the author of the article). I had the same problem until I discovered bsflite (http://bsflite.sourceforge.net/ http://bsflite.sourceforge.net/).

Auguste 15y ago

I've found myself using console applications more and more recently. The only GUI applications I use out of necessity are Firefox, Keepass and VirtualBox. I use the console for everything else: Cmus for music, Newsbeuter for news feeds and podcasts, TaskWarrior for to-do management, Vim for coding, etc. The Ratpoison window manager helps me make the most of screen space and allows me to manage my windows with keyboard commands like GNU Screen. Unfortunately, I've never found an email client I liked, whether console or GUI, so I just stick to Fastmail's web interface.

joelhaasnoot 15y ago
VirtualBox does have a command line interface. You can start up headless images and such pretty easily. You could even start images with a VNC server, and control the machine from your browser. One less visual tool.
- mise 15y ago
  And I wonder if KeePassX has a CLI. Its GUI current form is clunky.
- Auguste 15y ago
  Oh, I should clarify, I don't use it as a server or anything like that. I have VirtualBox and a Windows XP image for any University work that requires Windows software. Right now that's, reluctantly, Microsoft Visual Studio.
RexRollman 15y ago
That's me right here. I love Ratpoison, although I think Evilwm is really good as well. I never liked e-mail in Unix, as I feel the whole MUA/MTA thing is too complicated, so I stick with Gmail (which I backup with Fetchmail to a mbox file).
- adimitrov 15y ago
  There's a problem with that, though: fetchmail won't notice state changes in your mailbox — like, whether an email is read or not, whether you've replied, forwarded it already, etc. That's why I came to despise the MUA/MTA schism of Unix so much: If I reply to an email on my laptop, I won't know it on my desktop. The only solution is to have a central server you can ssh into. Clunky solution at best. Solution: use Mutt's semi-new IMAP interface. Nothing is stored locally, and I can see whether I've replied to emails, and I can delete/move emails regardless of the computer I'm currently on.

mise 15y ago

Discovering Ctrl+r (for searching through past commands) was a big jump for me in CLI usability.

ordinary 15y ago
You'll also like this little bit I yanked from my .inputrc: # By default up/down are bound to previous-history and next-history, # respectively. The following does the same but gives the extra functionality # where if you type any text (or more accurately, if there is any text between # the start of the line and the cursor), the subset of the history starting with # that text is searched. "\C-p": history-search-backward "\C-n": history-search-forward
- telemachos 15y ago
  Discovering that you could so such things in .inputrc was a big lightbulb moment for me. # not relevant on osx #$include /etc/inputrc $if Bash # append a '/' to show a dir is a dir set mark-directories on set mark-symlinked-directories on # no audible or visual bell set bell-style none # use ls -F style highlights for completion set visible-stats on # go right to showing multiple options set show-all-if-ambiguous on # ctrl-p cycles through options "\C-p": menu-complete "\C-x\C-x": exchange-point-and-mark "\ew": copy-region-as-kill # easier back and forth by word "\C-b": backward-word "\eb": backward-char "\C-f": forward-word "\ef": forward-char $endif # Two silly macros # # Insert double quotes & set cursor between them "\C-x\"": "\"\"\eb" # # Insert single quotes & set cursor between them "\C-x'": "''\eb"
  - lloeki 15y ago
    I did not know you could put conditions in inputrc. Useful.
    - telemachos 15y ago
      I haven't gone to much further with it, but it is very handy: http://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/readline/readline.html#SEC11 http://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/readline/readline.html#SEC11

planckscnst 15y ago

Being able to script a program is amazingly powerful, but I find the reason I like terminal-based programs is primarily due to the interface. The interface of a terminal program (both command-line and interactive) is the keyboard, which is a vastly superior input mechanism than the mouse for most things. Any thought that goes into the interface of a terminal-based program goes toward the keyboard interaction; there isn't a GUI to think about. Because of this, terminal-based interfaces are usually much better than any graphical application.

chimeracoder 15y ago

I completely agree with this, and I'm glad that somebody's writing a series on how to be productive on the command line. I find Neal Stephenson's 'In The Beginning Was the Command Line' to be a nice overview of why GUIs became the dominant paradigm over the CLI. I understand the desire to be 'user-friendly' to less tech-savvy people, but it's a real shame that we've equated 'functional' with 'has a good-looking graphical front-end'. Even a few weeks after I began using the CLI (almost) exclusively, I couldn't imagine going back.

craftsman 15y ago

Last year I decided to get back to basics and to dive into using emacs for as many things as possible. It's been extremely difficult and disorienting at times, but it has a non-quantifiable "feels right" quality to it. I now find myself trying to do as many things as possible in emacs, but emacs + terminal + browser is extremely powerful. I'm not yet to the point of running a shell (elisp shell or otherwise) in emacs, but this troika is very powerful, and I'm extremely happy with it.

zobzu 15y ago
supress emacs and itll feel right Sent from my VIM.
rimmjob 15y ago
what programs do you use to do things that emacs cant?
- omaranto 15y ago
  That, of course, depends on what you use your computer for, but in my case there are very few programs I don't run inside Emacs: a browser, a pdf and djvu viewer, Mathematica, and a media player. I do use other programs, but mostly run them within Emacs (they're LaTeX, several compilers and interpreters, and a shell).

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Luuucas 15y ago

nice example for living the command line idea: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/instantfox/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/instantfox/

danohuiginn 15y ago
I prefer http://yubnub.org/ http://yubnub.org/. Yubnub also calls itself 'a command line for the web', but manages that without requiring an add-on
burgerbrain 15y ago
You can do that yourself what whatever site you wish by right-clicking on the search bar on any site an selecting "add keyword for this item".

zdw 15y ago

The fundamental part of this isn't the CLI/GUI conflict, IMO, it's this paragraph: For now, I just want to make the point that once you move to the command line, everything is trivially connected to everything else, and so you are mostly freed from being locked in to any particular type of tool The problem is people building standalone systems that aren't integrated with the whole. For example, most people's primary text editing environment doesn't carry over to their browser, or many GUI cases, their email program. Solve this problem and the rest of the issues wouldn't be so severe.

palish 15y ago
I often write emails in Vim, then ggSHIFT-vSHIFT-g"+yALT-TAB CTRL-vTAB ENTER. And that, my friend, is modern day integration between gVim and GMail on Windows.
- astine 15y ago
  Had you used mutt instead of Gmail, you would have simply used: SHIFT-zSHIFT-z. When you want to compose mail in one of these programs, it opens your specified text editor and uses the whatever text you enter as the contents of your message. It works a lot like the 'Intents' feature which has been Android has received so much praise for, only it's decades old. Actually, there's no reason for this to depend on the cli. In Firefox, there are plugins which give you a button to click under every text box which open your favorite text editor with a buffer already open containing the contents of the text box. Edit the buffer and save, and your changed appear in the text box. (This is, in fact, how I am editing this comment.) On Unix systems, a graphical mail program could easily use a shell call to get text from an external program. The only problem is, this just doesn't really happen. Vendors prefer proprietary interop with their own products rather than more universal interop methods.
- gmac 15y ago
  I'm not sure if you're saying that this shows the problem to be solved, or that it shows just how unsolved the problem is...
  - 15y ago

gue5t 15y ago

The biggest issue I have with the text-manipulation capabilities of the CLI is the inability to select text in the prompt with the keyboard. Shift+navigation buttons is standard to do this in GUI text boxes, but the CLI's slightly different notion of the cursor (box v. line caret) comes with the inability to select text keyboardly. How do others solve this problem? Are there e.g. readline replacements that have this capability?

slug 15y ago
Besides using yank/paste keyboard shortcuts, you can always use screen or tmux copy mode. If you need the output of a command sent to the clipboard, there's several ways, xclip is one of them.
j-kidd 15y ago
This is why X allows you to copy text by highlighting it, and to paste text by middle clicking. The problem was solved a long time ago. Just grab the mouse and stop being a keyboard elitist.
dredmorbius 15y ago
aptitude install xclip I map 'xc' to 'xclip' and 'xp' to 'xclip -o' (paste) with shell scripts. Copy to/from clipboard via pipes. Though X11 copy/paste works pretty well also. There are the odd occasions where a mouse is the right tool for the job.

emanuer 15y ago

This is definitely the wrong crowed to present following facts, but I feel it might enrich the conversation. <Quote> ...but I’ve seldom heard a usability expert end a discourse on human factors by acknowledging that graphical systems are only really the “best” solution for a certain group of people or a particular set of tasks. Most take the graphical desktop as ground truth – it’s just the way we do things. </Quote> The Human brain has estimated 2 billions nerves in the V1 & V2 region. Those regions are responsible for rudimentary visual recognition, of objects with different: Form (grouping, orientation, size), Color, Motion, Spatial position. This is one of the most powerful parallel computational systems known to men. It takes humans about 10 milliseconds to recognize an object standing out in those respects (e.g. gray text and one red word). Why am I putting this down? / What are GUI's good for: scan 1.3 million pixels (1280*1024 screen) ignore all text fields find all buttons identify a symbolic representation of the task at hand (e.g. save) The whole thing took ~40 milliseconds and most importantly: it is a task done so fast and effortlessly by the human brain, that we don't even think about it. Humans are visual animals, GUI's are a result of our evolutionary history. I am not stating that GUI's are the fastest way to get the job done. You still have to move the mouse, etc. A skilled Command Line user can get the job done without a 40 milliseconds delay and moving the mouse might take longer than typing the command. However, teaching the average person to use a new piece of software is near impossible without utilizing their incredible brain power for visual recognition. Graying a button out, making it red, green,... gives the skilled UX designer the ability to convey a lot of information without making people think.

jodrellblank 15y ago
It's not quite right to imply that because a command line isn't graphical it isn't using human visual recognition - we still see CLIs. We still use colour and non-word markup to convey information in CLI programs, such as hashes at the start of lines to indicate headings, or line borders to indicate a 'button', or : to indicate a command, e.g. in VIM. Many of us use it as if it was a hybrid system - a GUI display controlled by keyboard where possible.
planckscnst 15y ago
Then why do I spend many seconds trying to find certain buttons that are right in front of me ("Where the hell did that ordered list button go?") and even longer trying to find buttons that aren't even there? Terminal-based programs also do make use of color as well as white space and grouping. They do convey information visually. A primary example of this is `ls -l` (the color option is different on different systems, but is almost always aliased on by default).

richardk 15y ago

gui vs cli, interesting topic. i used to use the command line for everything but recently switched to using guis. switched mainly because gui applications seem nicer to me for completing common desktop tasks, for example listening to music, i can just click the rhythmbox applet and select a song as opposed to something like "mplayer ~/Music/some\ artist/some\ album/*" or manipulating files, it seems a lot nicer to me to be able to pull a file onto my desktop than type out (even with tab-complete) "mv foo ~/Desktop". ofcourse, there are exceptions when using a shell is much easier, for instance if i want to copy a large number of files whose filenames have some similar pattern. it's also very nice to be able to install some new program and just use it, why should i have to read long poorly written man pages? at the same time i still use a shell everyday, but as a programming/administration tool.

timmy-turner 15y ago
Same for me. For example, I like using git gui or tortoisehg when doing complex commits as those tools enable me to find, inspect and select all necessary files faster than typing a command for each file/task. For examining recent log entries or switching branches, pushing etc., I prefer the cli. For complex file tasks I use mc, which is a nice hybrid solution between a gui and a bare cli.
- freedrull 15y ago
  For git, have you tried tig? It has a nice ncurses interface for inspecting commits and doing all sorts of git related things.
icebraining 15y ago
For music, you should try a proper music player, like MPD and ncmpcpp. It has a music database, playlists and all that stuff.
- richardk 15y ago
  out of curiousity, does MPD/ncmpcpp make use of the shell? if it doesn't then i can't see how it'd be advantageous over a gui music player like rhythmbox

smharris65 15y ago

Can any of these command line programs connect to Microsoft Outlook email servers? That's the number one problem: at many work places Outlook is entrenched and the Outlook UI is terribly outdated.

djeikyb 15y ago
As long as Exchange is set up with the imap button checked, mutt works great. I don't know of an open source MAPI connector.
- dredmorbius 15y ago
  I wouldn't say "great" as far as IMAP goes, as Exchange gets horribly confused when there are multiple connections made to it. That said, I find offlineimap is a better tool than mutt's built-in IMAP support.

RexRollman 15y ago

When I am using a Unix based system, there are three graphical programs that I use: X11, Firefox, and Feh. Everything else I do can be accomplished inside of a Xterm.

pyre 15y ago
Do you only use mplayer with the aalib -vo option?
- RexRollman 15y ago
  If you are talking about video, I don't play video on the computer.

killerswan 15y ago

Most of the interesting GUIs today are web sites, which he uses... Anyways, I think icons are overrated, and the text hyperlink rules the universe.

njharman 15y ago

"I find the CLI to be faster, easier to understand, easier to integrate, more scalable, more portable, more sustainable, more consistent, and many, many times more flexible ... that’s a bold series of claims" besides "easier to understand" (which depends on an individual's experience and knowledge) I thought those were pretty much acknowledged / obvious. Not bold at all. no?

kellishaver 15y ago

As someone with a severe visual impairment, I use the command line as much as possible. It's easier to see and there is less I need to see. If I can type a command instead of having to hunt for a button, it means I can work that much faster and anything I'm looking at will be text, uncluttered, and high contrast. From the command line, I can navigate the filesystem, install software, search, edit text, download files, play music, and send email all without even looking at the monitor. Once you're comfortable with it, you can just close your eyes and let your brain and your fingers do all of the work.

rch 15y ago

Every now and then I have similar complaints, but I don't think it boils down to cli vs. gui - the situation is actually far worse. Building high quality productivity tools that are able to exceed the expectations of expert users is both difficult and time consuming... and there is almost zero market incentive to accomplish the task properly for consumer-class applications. [edit] this is not to imply that consumer apps are trivial -- I think I once saw Minsky discuss an early attempt at AI that started by interpreting children's books, thinking that would be easier than understanding journal publications, etc. -- it quickly became clear that the task of parsing a children's story requires an immense store of implicit context and as such, was completely intractable at the time. The challenge of writing 'simple' things like email, text editing, and spreadsheet apps seems related to that.

joeyh 15y ago

I never got into using mh, but have experienced a similar inversion when I switched to mpd, where what was a monolithic interface for playing music was replaced with a broad set of tools that center around the command line. It's exhilarating to enter that kind of environment, I found myself writing dozens of little utilities to control mpd in short order.

kqr2 15y ago

A nice essay on this topic by Neal Stephenson. In the Beginning was the Command Line http://artlung.com/smorgasborg/C_R_Y_P_T_O_N_O_M_I_C_O_N.shtml http://artlung.com/smorgasborg/C_R_Y_P_T_O_N_O_M_I_C_O_N.sht...

ysangkok 15y ago
> When Ronald Reagan was a radio announcer, he used to call baseball games by reading the terse descriptions that trickled in over the telegraph wire and were printed out on a paper tape. He would sit there, all by himself in a padded room with a microphone, and the paper tape would eke out of the machine and crawl over the palm of his hand printed with cryptic abbreviations. (...) His listeners, many of whom presumably thought that Reagan was actually at the ballpark watching the game, would reconstruct the scene in their minds according to his descriptions. > This is exactly how the World Wide Web works: the HTML files are the pithy description on the paper tape, and your Web browser is Ronald Reagan. The same is true of Graphical User Interfaces in general.

commandar 15y ago

Unless you keep the app open all the time (I’m assuming you do that because you have the focus of a guided missile), this is a program that you open and close several times a day. So why, oh why, does it take so much time to load? This is why, even though I disagree with many of the things Apple is doing with the OS, I think Apple is on the right track with the app lifecycle model with Lion. Most computers ship with far more memory than people actually use these days; why should you constantly open and close apps when you can just leave them resident? Most of the reason people even bother closing apps anymore has less to do with the resource-juggling that made it necessary in the past, and far more to do with workflow and window management.

cake 15y ago
I was confused with this part. People actually open and close their mail client several times a day ? Is it just closing the window or full app quit ? For me and people I know, the mail client is the first app open after boot and it is always "open". It takes me less than 2 sec on my 3 year old computer to display new mail.
- rch 15y ago
  I only check mail every few hours - when I need a break - and only actively correspond with people at the open or close of business. I don't have an open-door attitude at the office either.

justinhj 15y ago

The key advantages of a command line tool over a gui are power and flexibility. There's any number of ways I can find and filter files using the find command, and then with xargs I can pipe them all through a sequence of simple operations. In a typical gui file manager that kind of stuff is just not possible. The possibility space for what you can do is limited by the visual abstractions the original designer came up with for file manipulation. With command line tools that space is virtually infinite. Often we consider the command line to be for expert users, and consider it our job as system designers to hide it from the rest. But when you consider that most people are able to learn basic calculus at school, a skill that has practical use in real life in only a limited number of professions, why don't we teach people to use the gnu tools at school? A skill that would enable them to use computers in powerful ways for the rest of their lives?

richardk 15y ago
"... In a typical gui file manager that kind of stuff is just not possible. The possibility space for what you can do is limited by the visual abstractions the original designer came up with for file manipulation. With command line tools that space is virtually infinite." whilst i certainly agree with this, i would speculate that 80-90% of the average user's time is spent carrying out a handful of simple operations that are better catered for by guis. for the other 10-20% we have our virtually infinite space: the shell.
- rwl 15y ago
  This, to me, is exactly the problem with most GUIs. If you're spending 80 percent of your time doing a handful of simple, repeatable operations, you might as well be using a typewriter. Programs that force you to work that way are the worst kind of chains.
- justinhj 15y ago
  But they are limited permanently and may spend hours doing things by hand that could take a moment. A common one is renaming photographs.
william42 15y ago

jiri 15y ago

Keyboard is ideal for entering data, but GUI is superior to console for data output and visualization. It would be perfect solution if all OS/applications would have command line but with visual output. Instead of "menu" at the top, just command line. There some good modern approaches to this problem, for example gleeBox for control of internet browser is nice way of integration of console style control to GUI application.

enneff 15y ago

Most of the programs he describes aren't CLI programs but programs with a Terminal-based GUI. A real CLI warrior uses sh, ed, and mail. :-)

sgerrand 15y ago
Obligatory 'real programmers' links: * http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html * http://xkcd.com/378/ http://xkcd.com/378/

m0hit 15y ago

Tangentially related to post. Don Norman's essay on how command lines are better suited in a graphical world for various reasons. (of course a lot of us here feel this here already). http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/ui_breakthrough-command_line_interfaces.html http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/ui_breakthrough-command_line_inter...

shuwu83 15y ago

A pure CLI is an arbitrary constraint on program design. CLIs and GUIs are not adversaries or mutually exclusive. I see no evidence that designers are opposed to command interfaces given that many of the graphical programs I use incorporate them where appropriate. The world isn't black and white. GUIs can be fast and pointing can be faster than typing. In other cases, a written command is fastest way to get exactly what you want.

jeez 15y ago

a bit off-topic, but IS there a command line music player that works the way he illustrates in the article?

alexkay 15y ago
http://cmus.sourceforge.net/ http://cmus.sourceforge.net/
- officemonkey 15y ago
  I also just found out that "pianobar" is a cli for Pandora.com.
jesboat 15y ago
mpd

garron 15y ago

Hi, is there any mirror where I can read the post?, the site seems to be down.

discreteevent 15y ago

Its a pity that he is so absolutely wrong about the bike for one of its main use cases: Traveling a reasonably long distance over terrain that is not perfectly flat. A bad analogy weakens what follows unnecessarily.

jamesrcole 15y ago

As i commented over on that site, I wish we could have the best of both worlds. I'd like a UI that did a really good job of integrating command line and GUI features. Not something that just tacks them together. To do this you'd really have to think through the UI from scratch (and yes, I am interesting in trying this myself, but am currently working on other things). When you think about it, the fact that command-lines are text-only is really just a historical artifact and it's nothing inherent to the notion of command-lines.