Do you use the terminal or the graphical desktop to get things done?
 

You know what I mean. Do you prefer to work in a terminal emulator, or do you prefer to do the same things from a GUI desktop?

Me, I use terminal emulators for pretty much everything. Except for launching the terminal emulators themselves.

Note: Poll votes are public.

Both. Depends on the task.

I spend my days, every day, in a hierarchy of terminals managed by Tmux.

I do almost literally everything that is not inherently graphical through a terminal. Some things that come to mind...

System config and admin - 100% terminal
Filesystem navigation and management - 100% terminal
Task management - 100% terminal (TaskWarrior)
Development environment - 100% terminal (C/C++/PHP/HTML/CSS/SQL/...)
Database client access - 100% terminal (MySQL/PostgreSQL)
Remote system access - 100% terminal (SSH/SFTP/LFTP)
Knowledge Base (in house) - 90% terminal, also has browser interface
Graph generation - 100% terminal (Graphviz)
Image manipulation - 25% terminal (ImageMagick), 75% GUI (Gimp/Others)

Web browsing - 99% GUI (Firefox for now, infrequent use of Links)
Video viewing - 100% GUI (VLC)
Email - 99% GUI (Thunderbird)
CAD - 100% GUI
Print management - 75% GUI (CUPS/Firefox, sometimes lp and friends from shell)

Like Replica9000, it depends. I use whatever I consider the easiest and fastest at the time, and that isn't always the same. I probably lean more to the terminal, but I don't use it exclusively.

Same as astrogeek. Web browsers, email, CAD, etc. is all GUI because that's what makes sense. Everything else is terminal. Programming is a mix, vim (terminal) for quick checks and touchups, emacs (GUI) for larger development.

Local:GUI
Remote:terminal-emulation

Wax On.
Wax Off.

I only need GUI for Firefox/Thunderbird and videos.


Music: mpd/ncmpcpp
Torrents: rtorrent
WM: i3wm
The rest: emacs/vim (depending on my mood)

Edit: Can I just add for people who might not have tried it: if you heavily rely on terminal applications, a tiling wm is the best thing since sliced bread. I use i3wm but there are others as well.

The poll should have had a 'both' option which seems to be the consensus here, I also use both so I cant actually vote.

Both, depending on the task at hand.

Well, the question is actually...

Which I take to mean, given that you can do a task either way, which do you prefer, terminal or GUI.

I think the OP has been amended slightly as well, originally it included a "to be productive" condition.

There is no best way, nor do I prefer any particular way, as a long time prgrammer ( since 1977 ) I have seen all sorts of command lines and guis come and go and the best way is the way that gets the job done easiest and quickest, and if you are doing it for a living ( out of work at the moment ) then expense also comes into it, managers love it when you come in under budget!

Both, but usually to get real work done, I use the terminal. Why ? Because you can just write a few one-liners to do things that no one GUI program can do alone.

You obviously have never had to edit a flash animation so that it loops seemlessly, created an historical educational program about ancient greece etc etc, use of the terminal is not always the best way.

My thoughts exactly.

If I want to select or sort some output differently, replace some string or write output to a new file - the terminal gives me instant gratification, not to mention more options and finer control for most purposes. If doing the same things in a GUI then you are mostly limited to application specific search/sort/replace and file save options, always less convenient to select from a menu or dialog IMO - and you still have to move your hand to the keyboard to enter parameters.

The Unix genius of text in, text out, pipes and ability to create special purpose scripts-on-the-fly is hard to beat for productivity!

As noted earlier, some things are inherently graphical and for all things one needs to use the best tool available for the job, adjusted for one's own experience and skill set - and preferences.