Discovering one's Inner CLI

[Duane Attaway]

On Sun, 23 Nov 2003, Leo J Mauler wrote:

> Well, while I'm frantically searching the Internet for potential
> solutions to sticking XWindows on my outdated and obsolete laptop, I'm
> exploring command line stuff to get things done.
>
> One aspect of Linux history shines through like a lighthouse beacon:
> Linux did not have a period of time in which it was widely used without
> a GUI.  DOS had four years from 1980 to 1984 as a GUI-free OS, and even
> Windows 1.x/2.x/3.x aren't much more than a few extensions to DOS,
> giving DOS a fifteen year period without a decent GUI.  Linux starts up
> in 1991, XFree86 starts up in 1992, and Slackware popularizes Linux with
> XFree86 in 1994, giving Linux a GUI from the start.
> 
> Because of this there aren't as many graphical but non-XWindows
> applications for Linux, like people were forced to develop for
> graphics-inclined people who had DOS and no GUI yet.  SVGALib seems more
> of an afterthought than a core library.

I didn't find all any fancy gigahertz terabyte computers back in those
days.  Back then, the command line was my playground.  And still is.

Back in 1994, X still required at least 16MB of RAM.  That was at the low,
low price of $100 a megabyte.  You were doing good with a 40MB hard drive.  
We still had MFM drives around as the real work horses.  Command lines
ruled the land.  Everyone else was fit inside the matrix of GUI's.  We
called it Windows.

Gentoo has a forest of command line alternatives cataloged in its source
trees among the Gnome/KDE bretheren.  Something the BSD's had for years.  
But you have to get out of the city and go for a walk to find these
strange and exotic animals.  These applications are fully functional, yet
don't require you to grow a beard to understand them.  Many also have
built in front ends to work with X.  Minimalistic, yet fully functional.  
It is the way software should be.  If you have Gentoo installed, it is all
organized in the directory structure of /usr/portage.

The command line is not dead.  It is the magical forest of great animals
that keeps growing.  The best way to find these is to find favorite text
based applications and check out the author's web site.  They like to
share their ideas and often provide links to other cool stuff.  And those
links form the largest ring of FINE software to be explored.  This is a
community that does not require Google!

I can't speak highly enough of the state of software these days.  These 
times are better than ever.  But you have to take the red pill...