This doesn't seem to be any simpler. The CLI equivalents take about the same time, but selecting all text files surely takes longer than 'ls .txt', especially i

This doesn't seem to be any simpler. The CLI equivalents take about the same time, but selecting all text files surely takes longer than 'ls .txt', especially if there are a lot in the same folder (click first, scroll, shift+click last). If we extend the problem to do something like changing the extension (very common for me) for all selected files, the GUI is useless here. Say I want to turn all .txt files => *.txt.old for a cheap archival? In the GUI, I don't know how to do this. On the CLI, I can simply do a 'find -exec', which also allows me to recursively do the change. Sure, this would be trivial to implement (even Eclipse has a dynamic rename for variable names) with an extension, but this has to be done for each and every possible activity.