this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2024
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GUIs tend to only cover the common/basic usage. Which is easy to remember without a cheat sheet. When you need more advanced stuff then GUIs tend to become more of a sticking point I find. And with common workflows it is far easier to automate with the CLI then with a GUI.
What's stopping you just opening the terminal in those rare cases? For 99% of my daily needs I'm good with a good GUI
Typically because you have been leaning on the GUI for ages and don't know the CLI well enough to do the easy stuff quickly let alone the advanced stuff at all. Or are even aware of what you can do with the CLI. And if you do know the CLI well enough you tend to find it just faster to work with and easier to automate things.
How will manually retyping
git pull
orcheckout
30+ times a day, or using the terminal log instead of a nice GUI with VSCode integration, teach me to solve other complicated issues? I just don't really see the benefit of struggling for most of the time for something that might or might not happen laterYou should not be struggling most of the time when using the CLI. Basic uses is just as easy as any GUI. Learning the commands might be a bit more involved and you need to be a bit more proactive about it. Anything you need to do 30+ times a day you should be over the learning curve of and can just execute them just as quickly if not quicker than using GUI. Especially when you look at tab competition and the reverse history search.
But what using the CLI more often does teach you is how to lessen that initial learning curve. Making you quicker at finding the new commands you need and how they work slowly building up your tool belt of knowledge about the commands you do look up.