I had a moment today. I needed to format a usb drive, as there was a corrupted partition table. I spent 20 minutes trying to do it using partition table, but nothing worked. I came downstairs, SSH-ed(?) to my desktop from my phone (which, in and of itself, what the hell is that?!), and solved the problem, and wrote the .iso, in like 2 minutes. And I KNEW that not only COULD I do it with cfdisk in the terminal, I could do it FASTER.
I love that feeling. I’m addicted to that feeling. I’m gonna chase that feeling.
This is why I really like the terminal. If you know what you want and you know how to do it or how to find it, you can do everything from the terminal and that’s really cool and powerful. It’s why I don’t like Windows anymore for the most part: I can do so much from just one app, whereas in Windows, it’s much more complicated to do that.
I grew up using the tcsh shell way back in the 90’s at university, we were pretty much just dumped into it, no intro, no 101, no primers, just man pages! But the whole concept of the command line, and what we could do, was something we just figured out through exploring. And I freaking loved it. Elm, Emacs, trn, ytalk, Wordstar (the Joe text editor has an amazing Wordstar mode!), everything was, for a short, magical while, command line.
I still love playing around with bash scripts and seeing how much I can automate, whether it’s backup scripts, quality of life stuff, or just simply learning more about tools like grep sed and awk, - that feeling’s crazy addictive, - it’s about learning, and growing, and appreciating the absolute respect Linux gives you to royally screw up, and learn from the process. And therein lies the magic!
I know the feeling. Just recently I switched to tiling WM to fully embrace almost entirely relying on CLI and it feels so good!
The limit of tinkering within the terminal is only sky and that’s what I came for.
And therein lies the magic!