How I got to love the terminal 💻️

I am old enough to remember the end of MS-DOS and Apple II Pro-DOS command lines being the primary way you worked with computer until I inherited my aunt’s old Macintosh Plus. I found terminal programs to be confounding, so many commands and keystrokes to remember. Why learn all those things, when you can have menus and icons to click on that were self-evident how they worked?

To this day, I generally use GUI software unless there is a reason that I can’t on my desktop – like the rare time an X11 server has crashed or I am preforming maintenance. But generally, I use GUI software. Yet, for some jobs – especially those that can be automated – nothing beats and old fashioned shell script. Terminals are good when you need to script things or run processes that are simple to run with minimal flags. They are good for piping the output of one command to another command.