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Comment by syl_sau | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure if this is satire or not, but certainly the single worst case of using a terminal is file manipulation. Nothing will ever beat the right-clicks or Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V combos. It's just more natural to "see" things that you move.

Now when it comes to more complex applications, I'd stop using the CLI if I had to search the manpages or the internet each time for doing something I already did previously. Since I discovered the Ctrl+R shortcut (for searching your history), it has been much easier. You read the manpage once, maybe you do an internet search, you enter the command and then you can find it back as long as it's still in your bash history (be sure to set HISTSIZE and HISTFILESIZE to correct values). I also have a DOCS.txt file where I put all the rare but useful commands I'm afraid of losing. I don't need to be an expert in ffmpeg's options (... though I sort of am now), I can just look at my history or my DOCS.txt file!

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> I'm not sure if this is satire or not, but certainly the single worst case of using a terminal is file manipulation. Nothing will ever beat the right-clicks or Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V combos. It's just more natural to "see" things than you move.

I've been using a Mac full-time for the last 8 years, and I do the vast majority of file manipulation in Terminal instead of Finder, because I find the command line easier and more intuitive.

That might be more because finder is so bad and less to do with file management GUIs in general. Windows Explorer and Nautilus are both much better than finder.

Windows Explorer is terrible. I used Norton Commander>windows commander>total commander>double commander my whole life. It's as fast as your keyboard gets. I cringe when I see people navigating files I'm Explorer.

Dolphin from KDE is also excellent.

Imagine using Windows Explorer... Right Click -> New Folder Choosing the files you want to move there -> CTRL+C -> Going into the directory -> CTRL+V Yeah that’s just the best and most efficient way to move files into a new directory.

You can also drag and drop

Creating new folder or moving/copying files can be done in two clicks with ribbon buttons.

This might be the case for you, but please don’t mistake it for an objective truth. I find the terminal far superior for file manipulation than any of the graphical file explorers I have used. I especially find copying quite clumsy, as I either have to open several windows and navigate to the correct locations, or leave the source folder behind as I navigate to the destination. In my terminal I can stay in the source folder if I want to, and even navigate directly to the destination with a short, generic command.

Objectively nothing beats software such as Midnight Commander, Krusader, Total Commander,... for file manipulation. You can do common operations with single clicks or shortcuts and they also have the shell integrated for less common operations.

Two pane window managers with a third pane for previews because I keep downloading pdfs and shit and I really need to know what is inside pog3715.pdf

I think this article might be satire because it spends so much time on files. Either that or it was written in 1992.

How many users have an iPhone or iPad as their primary computer? How often are they manipulating files?

Where's the "you don't need a gui" entry for making phone calls, sending messages, playing music, using GPS, etc... While you can certainly do all those things by command line, few people would argue it's a better experience.

Have you ever used Dired, the file explorer included in Emacs?

Agreed. It's not easy to accidentally wipe your entire home directory in the GUI, but it's just 9 keystrokes away on the CLI

its 5 keystrokes away on a gui

ctrl+a shift+delete enter

Come on. Those are three separate actions of which the last one is to "confirm" the deletion in a modal dialoge. Hardly the same as one command in the CLI. Also if that would really happen, you can go into the trash folder and restore the items. AND of course that would only affect the current directory whereas `rm -rf ~` is a different story.

A nitpick, you cannot (easily) restore files deleted with Shift+Delete, but yeah I agree with the rest.

> It's just more natural to "see" things that you move.

This is the fallacy of logos.

When I was learning about files and filesystems, the GUI had not even been invented. It is certainly not natural to me to conceive of file operations as cartoons moving around on a TV screen.

What's happening here is you're mistaking what you may have first learned for what is normal or natural. That it seems normal or natural to you is an inherent property of your experience, not an inherent property of file manipulation.

I get their point, though. It's less about seeing the animation of the move, and more about seeing state. Seeing state you're manipulating is helpful. CLIs, being naturally line-oriented, don't give you that.

Myself, I do a lot of file management in Emacs these days. Dired - Emacs folder viewer - essentially turns output of `ls` into interactive folder listing, that you can manipulate the way you'd use an orthodox file manager like Norton Commander or Midnight Commander, but that you can also just edit as text and have Emacs apply changes to the file system. To kind of boost your point about "normal" being learnable, it's absolutely normal for me now to expect to be able to rename files or change permissions by editing output of `ls`.

When I say "naturally" I'm talking about the way we, as humans, naturally interact with our environment. Sight may be the most important of our senses. We don't give orders to physical objects when we want to move them. I guess that's why we call files, well, "files".

Now, as others have pointed out, when it comes to specific operations involving redundant tasks, it's obviously easier to use CLI (`rename JPG jpg *.JPG`, etc.) (though in the case of mass renaming, it's less confusing to use Thunar's Rename right-click option).

I get what you're saying but I think it depends on what sort of file manipulation you need. When I'm trying to get a large set of images renamed from e.g. IMG_NNNNNN.jpg format into sequential zero-padded numerals for use with ffmpeg I personally appreciate the option to do it with a bash one-liner rather than using the mouse in a GUI.

> I'm not sure if this is satire or not, but certainly the single worst case of using a terminal is file manipulation.

In the old days you used Norton Commander for that, which ran in text mode. I'm sure there must be some open source equivalents today which run in the terminal.

There is of course Midnight Commander, but the visual aspect helps quite a bit imo

Midnight Commander

For some strange reason I have a GUI (nautilus), TUI (mc) and CLI (fish) at my disposal... but I do lots of file manipulation at CLI. Nothing will ever beat `massren` with the power of `vim`.

(But no kidding: somethings feels CLI very natural, sometimes feels GUI more natural for me.)

FWIW, `massren` + vim (or dired in Emacs) is TUI, not CLI. GP's point absolutely applies to pure CLI - operating on files by directly invoking mv, cp, ln, etc.

Have you seen a Vim master in action? They make a really good case for terminal file manipulation.

'Vim for everything' mentality requires a high degree of autistic behaviour in my opinion. I'm just not there on the spectrum.

It doesn't. It just requires openness for the concept. Same with Emacs for everything.

That's not to say you should do it. It's fine if you do, it's fine if you don't.

I consider vim and Emacs to be the same thing with different shortcuts. I have no desire to learn either.

hey, keep that shit on 4chan.

I'm autistic myself, diagnosed and all. I don't know what you are taking about.

Do TUIs count as GUIs? Midnight Commander (mc) is a TUI file manager with mouse support.

edit I see others beat me to it in mentioning mc. I'll leave this here anyway.

It depends on the context. For the purpose of this subthread, TUIs belong with GUIs, as both show you current state, make it interactive, and render a 2D view. In contrast, CLI tools only print out a snapshot of the current state (i.e. the output becomes stale as soon as it hits the TTY), and that snapshot is non-interactive.

In other contexts, you'd group CLIs and TUIs together. For example, both can be used from a terminal emulator, both are easy to use over SSH connection, and (an underappreciated feature) in both CLI and TUI apps, it's easy to just copy what they show as text.

Solutions like vidir (apt install moreutils) let you use vi to rename everything all at once.

It's like adding a second dimension, plus vi keybindings to the process

Really.

OK, rename all files ending in .foo to end in .bar instead. With the GUI.

Ironically, this is pretty easy to do in macOS' Finder.

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