Didn't know whether to vote for the moderate amount or spend more time in a terminal than with family and friends. There's a bit of room in between those two isn't there? (*sigh*) I decided to be optimistic and go with the moderate amount of time....

The cl is best way to do most things in Linux.
The cl is only way to do a lot of things in Linux.

I only use gui for web browsing and if I'm editing lots of text files, like coding.

I have to admit that I am probably the laziest terminal/console user in the world: if it wasn't for typing in responses in LQ, I wouldn't have much use for my keyboard.

However it took me a long time, reading each file in /etc both here in Debian and a mounted partition that has an Opensuse 10.2 installation on it, in order to find the setting that enabled PgUp to auto-complete a three letter typed input --- finally I found it in /etc/inputrc. I only had to delete two #'s and bob's yer uncle.

Now I just type ifc[PgUp] for ifconfig -a OR ifc[PgUp][PgUp] for ifcounfig wlan0. With iwc[PgUp] I can scroll through each of my settings for my wireless card (applicable to a couple of locations). With iwl[PgUp] I get iwlist wlan0 scan to see which ap's are available and their power levels.

When I boot into Opensuse, in order to 'dd' my Debian partition to an external usb hdd, I just have to type my password into a session auto-opened root terminal and the type dd[PgUp] to auto complete the full dd command. It takes about 17 minutes to copy a 10.5GB partition, well worth it when I do actually type something silly that completely screws up my running distro.

No, I don't spend my whole life in a terminal - at least 50% is spent monitoring LQSpy and opening tabs to read and/or comment on various posts.

Hehehe... The same could be said for MS OSes, or at least it was better that way- I loved using the DOS commands through Windows v3.11. AFAIC, they ruined computing when they forced you to use GUIs (read 'Windows versions') for everything in '95.

Just my

Commands I use most frequently:

df -m

su or sudo bash (depending on distro)

cp -a

chmod -R a+r

... and the command to run my backup script.


- TSloth

You left out the only option I would have picked:
"Whenever it is the best tool for the job."

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about 6 hours a day....

Which is like always when you are running Arch or Slack. Well atleast if you are using a minimal wm configuration then you need cli and hotkeys a lot.

I need both the text interface and the graphics interface. It is difficult to do anything a bit
involved without writing text. I hope that 2010 will be the year of the slate or the tablet PC. I would
rather use a pen than a mouse. It would be great to do both text and graphics with a single medium.
This would open numerous new forms of interactions between people.

Right now a keyboard is a pretty powerful device; that's why I use Emacs for a lot of tasks.

I spend more time in a terminal than with my family and friends ... sorry, but I guess it's true ... the terminal is my only friend now, but at least it's useful and helps me do things quickly, easily efficiently. Hmm, maybe even better than a read friend.

Now all I need to do is make a robot.

I'm with pixellany on this one. Don't be afraid of the terminal. If it's the right tool, use it. Sometimes you even have to drop out of X to the real CLI and use that (e.g. to update your video driver). It's just a tool. You wouldn't use a hammer to tighten a screw. Well, not twice, anyway.

I don't use the virtual consoles all that often these days, but it's very rare that there's not an open xterm on my X11 workspace (more often than not, a couple of them). That doesn't mean to say that I won't use a file-manager app (or other graphical interface) when that makes more sense.

If you ignore the command line completely then you're missing out on a lot of the power available from working on a UNIX(like)environment.

Have you tried powershell on windows?

I have created aliases so that the cmdlets are named after the appropriate Linux/Unix command

I endeavor to spend more time with my friends and family...

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Usually I have 10-15 terminal windows open, different machines, different users.

Except my desktops and laptops all my firewall, server and system control computers are headless, so I use command line only.

I have to deny that I spend more time behind the command line than with my family, my wife would kill me if she would read that.

jlinkels