Myth of the CLI

Bill Garrett‘s “Sorcery: The Myth of the Command Line” is one of the best articles I can point to as to why I find myself going back to the CLI in any OS I’m running, when I truly need to get work done.

I’ve been on a self- and technology-imposed hiatus from the Linux world for a little over a year now, because I found that I was spending too much time tinkering with my Debian installation rather than doing something productive.

Slowly, however, I’ve begun to miss the Penguin, and I’m thinking of spending a few days in intensive reinstallation.

Case in point: today I needed to make about twenty numbered directories in Windows. I got through the first few [right-click, mouse down, click New, mouse over, click Folder, type in the name of the folder, enter, repeat], when I realized “Wait, this is STUPID!” I then popped open a command terminal [type in one string, enter, up-arrow, backspace-and-replace the last digit, repeat] and completed in about thirty seconds what would’ve taken several minutes using the GUI.