Many of you probably aren't old enough to remember when most of us did our computing
through a command line, you know, where you type commands into a black screen instead
of using modern niceties like Windows, icons, and mouse cursors.
But despite the fact that graphical user interfaces, or GUIs, are a much easier way
to interact with our phones and PCs, the command line is still alive and kicking.
Somehow. If you're a Windows user, it's easy to find both the command prompt and power shell in
the start menu. And if you use Linux instead, you're probably familiar with Bash, which also uses a command
line. But in 2021, why exactly are these things still around?
So if you're a bit older and you've ever used a DOS machine, you probably know that
even though computers back when DOS ruled the world were way, way slower than what we
have today, command lines still tended to respond very quickly.
You typed in a command to perform some kind of file operation and it just worked.
This is part of their modern appeal. Their lightweight text interface makes them extremely easy to run on even low end machines.
So if you need to get something accomplished, the command line can be a very reliable way
to do it, especially as fancy GUIs are a lot more prone to errors or crashes, as anyone
has ever used Windows ME can attest to. Man, even that makes you old.
But command lines can make things very quick for other reasons as well.
This might sound counterintuitive as it seems like you have to type out long drawn out commands
for everything you need to do. But the upside to this approach is that if you want to perform a complicated or repetitive
task, a command line can make things much faster.
For example, if you have to move lots of files around or manipulate large datasets, it might
require lots of repetitive mouse clicks or copying and pasting within a GUI like File
Explorer or a spreadsheet program. But with a command line, you can easily automate these tasks, especially as you can keep tacking
on different arguments and switches onto the end of the line in order to perform these
tasks with precision. Assuming, of course, you're typing them correctly.
That is, yeah. Command lines also enable consistency across platforms.
This is especially true in Linux. Because Linux is open source, it has many different distributions created by many different
developers. But the Bash Shell, born again Shell Shell, is supported by a huge number of Linux distros
and even by macOS, until recently when they replaced it with Fish or XSH?
Things ZSH. Yeah, that's the one. Anyway, even if the GUIs have differences, you more or less know what you're getting
with the command line. There are also many ways in which the command line is more powerful.
This might not seem so obvious. So many of us are used to finding ways of getting things done with a GUI.
But when you use a GUI, you're limited to only the options the developer could fit on
the screen or chose to give you. However, there are a lot of tricks you can accomplish through a command line that you
might never know you could do if you only use a GUI.
For example, in Windows, you can do things like view a saved Wi-Fi password, set a timer
to shut down your PC once it's done downloading a large program or file, or even batch rename
files with far more flexibility than you can get in Windows Explorer.
And this isn't even considering the myriad ways third-party programs support custom features
through the command line. In fact, there's so much flexibility with the command line, once you learn how to use
it at least, that during the Windows XP era, Microsoft introduced PowerShell, a souped
up command line interface that supports much more advanced features.
Keep in mind, this was way after most people stopped using command lines for everyday computing.
But the idea was to make Windows more useful for sysadmins, programmers, and anyone else
that simply wanted to get more out of their computer. So bottom line, while a command line might seem more tedious, it could be worth learning
if you want to take your PC experience to the next level.
And hey, it comes to the built-in dark mode. Thanks for watching guys, like, dislike, check out one of our other videos like this one
on Who Owns Linux. It's pretty good.
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