thanks in advance

Welcome to LQ,

Perhaps it might be best if you peruse our Welcome FAQ to aid your question to be more clear.

One can use the command line for a great deal and there are references available if you search the web. Perhaps you can be more focused with which specific things you expect to do on your system and via the command line.

2 members found this post helpful.

That depends entirely on what you want to use your computer for. Word processing? That's tough to do without a GUI though I could imagine using a set of tools to create documents in text form, transform them into a "document" (say, by using LaTeX), and either printing then for review or finding a graphical previewer that doesn't require the X Windows system to be running (or Wayland). Email? That's been done in non-graphical environments on UNIX/Linux since, well, forever. Just don't expect to see the images that are part of most emails nowadays. Browsing? I know of several text-oriented web browsers. Again, images are not going to be viewable. Programming? Data analysis? Have at it!

You haven't given anyone much to go on though I still HTH.

Cheers...

You did not post any request, did not describe any problem or issue, so actually I have no any idea how can I help you (you only explained what you want).
usually I post this link: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-...html#beprecise. to ask you to describe your problem much better. In short: what do you have, what did you try, where did you stuck?

Thanks, I have been on linux a long time, just I avoided the terminal relying on the gui instead, and now I am just wondering if could improve my understanding of the terminal by setting the goal of doing everything by the terminal. Is it a realistic goal, thanks for the replies so far.

Easy to do as it is set up. Open a terminal window and do everything in that window. It can even be expanded to full screen if you want.
An alternative would be to boot to run level 3 so the graphics are not even started, but that is not as easy nor as simple to revert if you want the gui for something like word processing, reading mail, etc.

Thanks, I will give is a try and report back where I don't understand. Mark as solved please.

you need to mark it solved, check thread tools (upper right corner)

fleamailman does not even seem to understand what a GUI is; they probably envision a bunch of terminal windows on a desktop, instead of a TUI-only system. The latter is easy to achieve - simply do not install a GUI, or do not log into it.
Run that for a while and see how you get on with it, is my advice.

Furthermore I question their definition of "a long time" - it's such a relative term. I bet for a teenager, half a year is "a long time"...

GUI: graphical user interface
TUI: text user interface

1 members found this post helpful.

I spend a lot of time in terminal windows. I'm rarely without at least one open.

Unlike Windows and Mac whose GUIs were designed to replace the command line completely, x11 was intended as a GUI to work in conjunction with the command line. "Modern desktop" developers seem to have forgotten this, and consequently, so have their users.

It's not a case of one or the other. Don't fall into that trap.

I use the terminal on my Macs from time to time but then again I am not the average Mac user...I would use the WSL terminal on my work laptop if WSL weren't so useless...instead, on my work laptop, I use Kali and terminals - currently have 4 with 4 split tmux sessions. I love the terminal, very powerful.

All of the server administration I do/have done has been in terminal windows.
I can count one hand the number of times I’ve had access to a system console. At my las5 place of employment, I didn’t even know where the servers were physically located. All the sysadmins and DBAs worked in terminals on desktops and laptops.

I can think of several good projects to start with.

Learn how to use the vim editor.

Set up a text email client, such as Mutt or Alpine.

Install and use w3m, which I consider the best text web browser. It even does tabs.

In the process, you will learn a lot about using the command line.

1 members found this post helpful.

Well said.
My previous post could be misread but i didn't mean it that way.

I think there are a lot of different use cases. For example I have an ubuntu with Gnome (and gnome-terminal), and I ssh into servers where there is no X, no GUI at all.