I find programs made for the command line more responsive and nicer to use.
People are usually skeptical about entering text in a command prompt, but they should give it a try, it’s just asking the computer to do something.
Unix
The Unix way of doing stuff, as far as I understand it, is that every program should do one thing only and do it well. You just mix and match this various programs and get a new tool you can use to do what you need to usually.
There’s a nice video from the 70s about Unix available on the AT&T YouTube channel. I find it very interesting too, it was a different time of course, but the ideas are still relevant today.
You can also listen to very interesting people who made history like Brian Kernighan and Ken Thompson.
The concept of piping the result of a program into another it’s a very powerful thing and when applicable it’s a very fast and readable way to solve a problem.
Text User Interface programs
There are also graphical programs for the command line too.
There is usually a good documentation about command line programs. The manual pages and most of the time the command itself it’s useful and saves you the time to search how to do x on the internet.
A nice thing about CLI programs is they provide the user with a consistent interface across different devices and programs.
Another cool thing is how efficient you get doing stuff using CLI programs, you usually need just few keystrokes and no mouse iteration.
You can solve basically any problem by using the right tool for the job after you think a bit about it.
A list of useful programs
This is a (non comprehensive) list of interesting programs I use daily more or less.
- vim
- grep
- awk
- jq
- fzf
- newsboat / podboat
- calcurse
- taskwarrior / timewarrior
A conclusion
So just try CLI programs, you’ll probably find a lot of them useful somehow.