because every additional layer of abstraction disrupts communication with the Machine Spirit even further

Command line is a lot more powerful for a lot of cases. Most CLI programs are written with the idea that the caller might be another program, so they tend to be easy to chain with pipes and redirection. So you have tons of simple tools that you can combine however you need.

For tasks that I know, I’m faster in the terminal. For tasks where I’m less familiar or that are very important (like disk partitioning) I prefer a GUI because with a GUI I can usually see a bit better what I’m doing.

Terminal tasks for me include copying stuff, setting folder permissions, uncompressing or compressing folders, quick edits in vim, etc.

I wanted to see what all this talk about vim was and now I’ve been stuck for 3 years.

The terminal is a power tool. I can do stuff with it that’s slow or inconvenient with graphical tools.

I really like the piping capabilities of the Linux terminal. Incredibly useful for text processing.

Reproducable actions that do exactly what you expect.

1. It feels great
2. Terminal programs run on a potato
3. They are almost always way more powerful then their GUI counterparts
4. They integrate with scripts and other tools for unlimited power and flexibility!
5. You feel like a hacker man
6. Your IT literate friends think you are cool
7. You can really do things your own way

So yeah I love using the terminal for almost everything

Terminal is faster when you’re used to it and sometimes offer more customization options to some apps that has both a GUI and TUI/CLI version.

I use the terminal (st with zsh and tmux) for:

• file management (advcpmv, fd, trash-cli, fzf …)
• emails (neomutt)
• text editing/coding (neovim)
• project management (taskjuggler)
• image viewing/organization (ucolla,ge)
• online video browsing (ytfzf)
• calendar (khal)
• ssh
• vpn
• news aggregator (newsboat)
• web, bookmarks manager (buku)
• passwords manager (pass)
• dotfiles manager (stow)
• not in the terminal but I also have a lot of scripts used in rofi to control my audio input/outputs, launch a web search, access my bookmarks, autocomplete username and password fields

I’m sure I’m missing some obvious tools I use daily. It’s hard remember everything when it becomes so natural.

I have shared my experience with some of these tools here.

Here’s the ELI5 answer I’d give to your friend:

Computers are like servants. They do whatever you ask of them. But to be able to ask them things, you must do so in their language. On the extreme low level that means writing code to make programs, but on a higher level, it means talking to programs someone else already wrote using special commands.

The buttons and switches on a GUI that you can click on with a mouse are like pre-recorded commands that instruct the computer to do some specific thing. The button or whatever will have a symbol or text description that lets you intuitively know what it’s for, and when you click on it, it plays a pre-recorded command to the computer in its language that tells it to do that thing. With these buttons, you can ask things of the computer in its language without having to know that language.

As you get more intimate with the computer, this system can start to feel a bit stiff. You’ve essentially got a butler who doesn’t speak your language, and any time you need to give him a task, you have to fumble through a basket of pre-recorded tape recorder messages to find the one for the task at hand, and play it to him. For more complex tasks, you may need to chain several of these together. It gets slow and awkward. And god forbid you don’t even have a tape recording for the thing you need.

It’s easier if you learn the butler’s language yourself. Then you can ask him for things directly. You’re not bound to any collection of pre-recorded messages to use, you can tell him exactly what you need. And if you don’t happen to know the word for something, you can look it up. It cuts out all the faffery with fumbling over a tape recorder looking for the messages you need to play.

Using a terminal is roughly the computer equivalent of speaking to your butler in his native language. You’re not limited to only the buttons and features any particular program lets you have; you can make up exactly what you need on the spot. And you never have to bounce your hand between a mouse and keyboard to do it, you can keep your hands in one position at all times, which really adds up over time in both speed and comfort.

Practicing this will also give you the side perk of better understanding how the computer actually works overall, and what it’s actually doing. This knowledge can come in super handy when diagnosing problems with the thing. When a GUI gives up, a terminal can keep digging.

Because it just works. No bullshit. No bloat. Just fast and efficient.

Because I prefer using keyboard for almost everything and in most cases terminal is faster than GUI.

Because every IDE implementa a different git interface and I can’t be bothered to figure out where they hid the commit, push, pull etc. buttons this time.

many times it’s faster to do stuff in terminal than in gui

To get shit done in general.

If I need to rename a file, yeah, I can do that by right-clicking it in the file explorer, and selecting ‘rename’ from the menu. Two files? Painful but doable. Three files? Oh hell no, I’m switching to my always-open-in-background terminal window, and write a quick c=1; for f in *.jpeg; do mv "$f" $c.jpeg; c=`expr $c \+ 1` ; done and it takes twice less time than clicking things through with mouse.

And yes, I wrote that shell command off the top of my head on the first try and without edits.

it allows easy scripting. also for frequently used commands, i can just scroll up in the history, instead if clicking the same buttons over and over