amXor

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7.17.2010

Why The Command Line?

Vaporware

The software arms race is heating up. At the forefront are apps, which are small, single purpose programs that are very stylish, but generally have very little functionality. The reason I say that they have very little functionality is because they are built as small standalone, self-contained programs designed for a very specific purpose.

The iPhone needs multitasking because every little bit of functionality is wrapped in it's own app. The average computer user has many windows open and many applications installed because we need many apps to complete one task.

In all these things, I believe that software developers have lost their way. The user is forced to multitask extensively and perform every task one step at a time.

The Killer App

For those that do not understand the UNIX command line, it looks like a deviously complex and foreign language. There are no visual clues about how to accomplish a certain task, no tooltips or interactive dialogs to walk you through.

What they don't see is thousands of purpose-built apps all designed to work seamlessly with one another and to be completely automated. Using a command line is not just a bunch of typing to achieve the same result as a mouse command line, it is a bit of typing to achieve what a thousand mouse clicks could do.

The standard question I get when people see me working in a fullscreen terminal is "Wow, are you a hacker?" No, I'm not a hacker in the sense you mean. I'm not decyphering encrypted passwords and finding loopholes in government databases or anything like that. I am a hacker in the sense that I'm not constrained by the functionality offered by graphical interfaces. I am a hacker in the sense that if I have repetitive or menial tasks, I'd rather let the computer do the work for me.

Learning the basics of the command line takes some work. Learning how to use the powerful text editors like Vim or Emacs takes some work. Learning how and when to use the versatile processors like Sed and Awk takes work. Learning how and when to tie these commands together into shell scripts or functions takes some work. But in all these things, it is work that pays off in higher productivity and far fewer hours spent repeating tasks that are better automated.

But the true value of the command line comes when you can effectively monotask. When you can focus on the task at hand and automate all the housekeeping. And when I say "housekeeping" I probably mean a lot more than you think.

For example, here's my current workflow for blogging:

  1. blog why_the_command_line? >> opens a new file in my blog folder in the Vim text editor.
  2. Type post using vim and the simple Markdown formatting.
  3. %s/CLI/command line/g >> Replace all occurrences of 'CLI' with 'command line', cause I knew I'd be typing it a few times.
  4. "publish why..." >> run the file through the Markdown to HTML formatter and email it to my blogger page.

I'm using two simple scripts here, one called blog and another called publish, and for most workflows that's all it takes. I now have a local copy in the easy to read markdown format and one on my blog in HTML format.

The value in this is partly the shortcuts, yes, but mostly the lack of context switching. There is no need for multitasking, because everything I need is a few keystrokes away, which allows me to focus. And that's a good thing.

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