Discovering one's Inner CLI

[lowell]

Duane, do you have any suggestions about Leo's cli spreadsheet? He's right 
about sc; it's pretty arcane and it's missing some key functionalities 
of its gui competition...

On Sun, 23 Nov 2003, Duane Attaway wrote:

> 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 solutions to sticking XWindows on my outdated and obsolete laptop, I'm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...
> 
> 
>