12 Dec 2025 - Stone Liu
Back in the “yee old days” physical terminals looked like type-writers. They were fed physical tapes that could be used to “punch” program outputs. The tape could even be read back into the machine for further program processing. (pretty neat stuff eh?).
Nowadays we have IDEs, entire systems driven for software development. They provide everything from programming language autocomplete, refactoring, debugging analysis and even agentic coding. So then again why ever go back to the way things were?
Everytime you open the terminal you see a black abyss peering into your soul. (Indeed, that is your reflection.). Its a world where you feel like you need to memorize magical incantations and spells so that you can just do the same thing you can with the click of a mouse.
Once we get familiar with a tool we sometimes want to use it for everything. I am by no means an exception to this, I love (neo)vim and write everything in it. Maybe not to the same level as emacs users (do they ever leave it?).
One thing I will say is that command line applications are more powerful than gui applications if you know how to use them. Alot of the bespoke tools from the bygone eras have been modernized and revamped. (Seriously! take a look at fzf, ripgrep, and bat).
But one of the best things about using a command line interface over a gui, especially on UNIX systems is that you can connect any and every cli program together. This is because in UNIX, everything is a file. So after you are done using fzf to look for that specific file on your system, you can pipe the output of that program into a text-editor like vim and start slamming down keys like a badass.
In the age of GUIs it might feel a little archaic to use a terminal interface. Afterall, why do I need to learn a bunch of magical incantations when a button can do the same thing for me? For simple use cases, its much better to use a GUI to accomplish tasks. GUIs promote discoverability, its just much easier to find things in a GUI as opposed to a command line interface. However, the power of the command line lies in its ability to chain, pipe, and compose simpler commands to accomplish more complex tasks. For example, say I wanted to find all file logs in a repository, search each log and remove the word “stone” from each file, store the removed word in a output file with the location of where I removed the word from each log file. Totally random right? But I gurantee you that no GUI application has a button for that. If it did, it would be hopelessly complicated as opposed to writing a simple shell script:
