How about yakuake? The Quake style drop down terminal is an easy way to do both command line stuff while using the gui.

When I'm on my Ubuntu machine (it's in the living room so I don't get in trouble for not spending time with my family!) I almost always have a terminal open with a sudo su run at the beginning so I have quick root access. On my Slack machine with a default root login I use the command line less, but I don't bother to startx on it at boot, because a lot of what I do with that is remote from this machine via ssh or remote X sessions started from a virtual terminal. For basic editing and navigation the command line is just faster than 6 clicks to get to a file.

Command line users are, of course, the only real users . . . Whether they know it or not, pure pointy-clickers are just slaves.

I boot in GNU Screen with a hacked Emacs, but I do use X (and xterm) a lot as well.

Huh?
I don't like plain terminals and do everything on top of screen + (a modified) emacs.
That would make me a slave as well but I'm not pointy-clicking anything.

I don't see how you can't use the command line and get things done.

@propofol yakuake

OMG you mean there is a worthless QT based terminal that replicates what I already do with fluxbox+xterm+asthetic scripts for numbering the terminals ???

Mine even looks better, all I get is the window with a small tab for the console number.

I will never understand the endless need for people to replace xterm.

That covers a lot of territory when you're a beta-tester.

Exactly, and the same can be said for a lot of other things, as well.

Cheers

I was away on holidays over Christmas when something happened to my home box and I couldn't ssh into it. I had to phone my father-in-law (a winxp user) and get him to drive to my house. I talked him through logging into my box and re-starting a couple of services (ssh and firewall). It was a relief when I was able to ssh back into my box - but is my father-in-law an organic command line or some form of gui because I was talking and not typing???

A co-worker downloaded a mac version of ffmpeg with a gui. I went through with him all of the settings I would use in the terminal and had to go to three separate screens. In the end it produced a separate .m2v and .m2a file instead of an .mpg file. It took longer, and didn't work as expected. Using the terminal, I only need to use CTRL-r to recall my last usage and change the input and output file name.

For repetitive tasks, tasks where the objects are spread out under several diretories, or when there are thousands of objects to process, using the GUI is often a handicap and a lot slower and difficult than a simple oneliner or loop in bash. Use the best method, whether it is using the GUI or the console.

Almost always tend to use the command line for everything. Plus, command line is best for remote computer administration.

Who here uses ncmpcpp or a cli music player+mpd?

I sometimes use ogg123.

I live in X, but it's rare that I sit down at my machine for more than 10 minutes without needing the terminal to do something. It's just so much more convenient to manage the filesystem from the command line. And also for sorting things out if X won't start for whatever reason.

Heck, I even use "CMD" in Windoze at the office for various things. As dain-bramaged as it is, it's more efficient for certain kinds of file manipulations than the GUI.

I have the shortcuts Super-T for a terminal and Super-R for a root terminal. I seem to find something to do in the command line every few days, even though I use the Gnome tools when they are available; I don't think they'll make a GUI front-end for mkinitrd or sensors any time soon.

A GUI is handy for web browsing and things I do twice a year or once a month. For the rest, there's Konsole.

The exception that confirms the rule is of course tasks that require visual feedback, e.g. for plain text editing I really like vim, for documents with "a layout", I use Openoffice.org. For converting from png to jpg, I use convert, for changing the background color, I use the gimp.