[wellylug] The importance of command line applications

Steven Mulvay steven.mulvays.groups at paradise.net.nz
Sun Jan 29 00:35:54 NZDT 2006


Hi all,
I have an opinion about the importance of command line applications that I'd like to share with you all to see what you think. I think that the usefulness and versatility of command line applications is starting to become under appreciated. I think it's sad that gui applications are being valued over command line applications because in many cases command line  applications can do just as good a job as their gui counterparts, if not better! For example, someone once said to me "Steven why don't you use Synaptic? Aptitude is old and crappy." Aptitude may be old but I don't see anything wrong with it. I don't need a graphics-bloated interface just to download and install software. In many cases my downloads take a long time, in these situations I often boot into run-level 3, (text-only mode) run aptitude and go watch TV. Then the computer can just sit there downloading without the unnecessary overhang of X11. If I need to go out in a while and intend to shutdown the computer 
once the downloading and installation is complete then loading X11 at any stage would be a complete waste of resources.

Please don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking X11 or any of it's window managers, (I probably wouldn't use Linux if it did not have X11) I just want to make sure that development of command line applications continues and that the shells do not get phased out like Microsoft phased out DOS.

Who agrees with what I have said? Jethro, maybe we could have a website poll on the subject. I would also like to know which magazine would be the best one to approach to get my little speech published? Thanks for listening to what I had to say.

Cheers,
Steve :-)




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