[ale] What happened to the command line

[George Allen]

I was just noticing the other day while 'rtfm'-ing... the signal-to-noise on 
has gone up the past couple of years with GUI trained types vs. command line 
types.

Downloading slackware onto a stack of 20+ floppy disks may not have been the 
most user-friendly way to learn, but at least I kindof knew what I was doing 
by the time I'd read all those man pages... which are still my first 
reference for anything.

But now lots of the docs and distros want you to do things with their tools... 
and when I search online I tend to find myself reading the Gentoo docs - 
because they're always based on doing most everything from scratch out 
of /etc with vi. (or emacs) :)

I switched along time ago from slackware to debian then ubuntu, because I fell 
in love with aptitude and no longer had time to find and compile everything I 
wanted form scratch.

As an aside I never hear ncurses get any love - but for a clean fast interface 
it tends to be more useful to me than the equivalent GUI programs. I usu. 
have a yukake open with shells, midnight commander, sometimes mp3blaster or 
cymbaline... and always aptitude or apt-get for pkg mgt. Tried synaptic or 
that other one and hated it. As I remember all of slackware's old curses 
dialogs were as simple and clean as an interface can get.

-G


On Thursday 06 March 2008 11:04:01 Jeff Lightner wrote:
> Interesting observation; as an old time UNIX hand it amazes me how often
> questions others post about Linux stump me simply because they are based
> on people using GUI environment rather than the command line.  Not that
> I don't ever use the GUI but for most part if I use it my purpose is
> either to open a terminal window so I can get a command line or to use
> Firefox.  On the flip side there seem to be few and far answers here
> when one asks about Enterprise usage of Linux.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of tom
> Sent: Thursday, March 06, 2008 10:18 AM
> To: ale at ale.org
> Subject: Re: [ale] What happened to the command line
>
> On Thu, 6 Mar 2008, Ned Williams wrote:
> > So then does 15 response emails detailing how people have to make
>
> their own
>
> > shortcuts and how links to the console are no longer on most KDE and
>
> Gnome
>
> > based interfaces confirm the original posters question that it is
>
> getting
>
> > harder and harder to find the console window?
> >
> > Ned
>
> <<snip>>
>
> I don't think so. I think it shows how important the console is to a
> number of people on this list.
>
> YMMV of course.
>
>
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