Terminal commands running behind the GUI
 

Recently I gained interest in running command from the terminal, like rhythmbox-client --play-pause and vlc --open, but I could not find the vlc's pause command under vlc --help.

My question: So my question is basically whether there's a way I can have a terminal display the commands that run when I do some action.

For example, when I click on pause in vlc, the terminal should show me what command it used to pause vlc. What's the closest ting I can get to this?

VLC doesn't have command line switches for controlling a running player. It does support a remote command interface. Here's a nice article about it.

Even if VLC had command line switches for player control, it wouldn't use them internally because calling out to the command line is enormously less efficient than in-process methods.