Dude ... you need to chill, and do some research.

There's screen to let you mulitplex several "terminal" sessions
in (even full-screen) cli - I use it all the time at work, for
work on remote machines w/o a GUI.


Cheers,
Tink

Woah... I've never seen Tinkster use this language before.
I mean, you are the LAST person I would have expected to use "dude" and "chill". No offense intended of course; that fact alone resounds refinded speaking.

So... what's the problem? You seem to have solved it yourself already ;^)

Umm...you do know you can switch to another VT with Alt+F(n), right? That's how I multitask in pure text-mode CLI (if I ever need it). And like Tinkster said, there's screen, which extends that capability further...

It occurs to me that maybe Kenny_Strawn just likes to complain...

I've just got to make some slackbuilds for this:
http://soosck.wordpress.com/2010/11/...mand-line-css/

When I'm in runlevel 2 I can already do pretty much everything I need without problems (tmux, links, mutt, etc). This browser will be the cherry on the cake =D

Hi,

I've looked and even searched some more for 'bare cli'. New technical term or just another misuse by a misinformed youth? If you would look at the following; Command line interface - LQWiki:

• Learn the command line (www.linuxcommand.org)
• An introduction to the Linux command line (www.tuxfiles.org)
• List of Linux commands for common operations. (www.pixelbeat.org)
• Learn unix in 10 minutes (freeengineer.org)
• CS Student Linux User's Guide (tlug.up.ac.za) Easy introduction to the command line interface (wiki)

You are using this within a DE or desktop. If you wish to have multiple running tasks within a console or terminal then I suggest that you look at 'man screen'. 'screen' will allow you to multiplex within a physical terminal.

You should do some research or even learn basic operations before you stick your foot in mouth. Unless of course you enjoy that situation.

All of this talk makes it sound like 'CLI' (I assume this means 'shell'; I hate that CLI moniker) and GUIs are mutually exclusive. At any one time I will ordinarily have around 50 instances of Konsole running, each with up to 6 or 8 tabs opened, for a total of 100 to 300 shell sessions running concurrently (multitasking). This is on a KDE desktop (GUI). On the other hand, I exercise control over several Linux hosts which have only serial terminals as consoles. No GUI is even possible there, so text-mode shell interfaces are still a requirement.
If by 'CLI' people are referring to the text-mode console(s), then that is quite a different matter, and requires something like Gnu screen in order to 'multitask', although most standard Linuxes provide for 6 text-mode consoles that can be accessed through the Alt-Fn key combos.
For the poster(s) who were looking for a way to browse the web in text-mode, there is lynx, which even though it obviously has many limitations, it is possible to do much useful browsing (I just used it to find and read some LQ forum threads). There is also wget and curl for extracting data from the web.
The whole point is that GUIs and shell interfaces can and do exist quite harmoniously, and one is not necessarily an alternative to the other.

--- rod.

@ Kenny

MrCode and I are not saying using a GUI is ineffective -- we both said we use them both where the CLI and GUI is appropriate for the task at hand. We didn't say we do everything 100% on one interface.

Personally, I'm more of a commandline junkie, but I will use a GUI when necessary.

@Kenny

While I agree that more hardcore tasks of image editing and various websites do require the GUI, there isn't really anything I can't do in a Virtual Terminal and no X. If I really need to multitask I switch to another Virtual Terminal and voila, more tasks can be done. If I have a command that needs no user input (like cp or mv) and I really know what I'm doing, I fork it to the background using the & at the end of the command and I don't have to wait for it to finish. It pushes it to the background and while it is a tiny bit slower (about 0.015s on my machine. yes I timed it xD) it gets the job done. So seriously bro, chill out.

You could say I'm kinda in the middle...

• File management: heavily depends on what I'm doing at the time and/or needs.
• Archive creation/extraction: almost exclusively CLI. a) I can't get Squeeze to extract anything without it segfaulting (yes this is what happens; I've run it from an X terminal and it gives me "Segmentation fault"), and b) it's usually faster for me to type something like tar -xvf blahblahblah.tar.gz than it is to open it in a GUI archive manager and hope that it extracts it correctly.
• Media conversion/manipulation: again, almost always the CLI. ffmpeg isn't that bad once you get comfortable with how its options work (I've even learned a way to record decent screen captures with it ), and sox really is "the Swiss Army knife of audio manupulation" IMO. But I do have Audacity for when I want to do more precise (and more complex) editing.
• Media playback: I likes my GNOME MPlayer. Plus which, this is kinda obvious (yeah, I think there's a way to let MPlayer use libcaca for video output, but who wants to watch a video in ASCII art? ).

Most of the time, even if it's a CLI-oriented task, I do it in an X terminal. Why? Because if I drop to a text-only terminal on my lappy, I can't get my X back when I want it (may have to start a thread about that in the main technical forums).

The CLI on Linux is a billion times better then the one on Windows and a million times better documented then the one on OS X. This is what originally brought me to Linux.

Me either. I guess thats way they called it caca.

I use mplayer to watch and play media files and dvd movies, but I use mplayer from the X terminal inside the desktop. Mplayer opens a new window and plays the video from there.

Agreed. The Linux CLI can do many things the Windoze CLI can't, and has man pages, --help, and plenty of online instructions for doing things in it that the O$ X CLI doesn't.

Besides, Android is Linux and it is much more popular than Windoze on the mobile platform.