Love the Terminal

There is one specific tool that every developer should love, in my opinion. That is, the terminal. Sometimes, it is also called command line or shell (with some subtle differences). It doesn’t really matter what operating system you are using. If you are working in IT, chances are high that being proficient at command-line usage will benefit you a lot. I will give you a few major reasons.

Efficiency

Terminal usage can make you much faster at several daily tasks. Once you are used to it, entering a command in your terminal is much faster than opening a graphical program, finding the appropriate action somewhere in a menu, and then performing several clicks. Compare this to a command that you can just type from your memory or copy and paste from a document. The more often you perform a specific action, the sooner it pays off to learn a command instead. The same goes for automating tasks. Often, repetitive actions can be automated by writing small shell scripts that can be run from the terminal.

Functions

Graphical user interfaces are useful, for sure, but they can only provide what exists already ‘under the hood’. Often, you can achieve much more by using the terminal and several command-line tools. Some functions or configuration options might not be accessible through a UI, or they might not work correctly. In addition, we can combine several command-line tools to form new useful functions. Imagine you want to replace many strings inside several files in a folder. You collected the strings that needed replacement in a separate file. Combining several command-line tools to work together allows us to do this in a quick and efficient way (i.e. reading input from a file and feeding it into a text replacement command).

Understanding

Lastly, terminal usage deepens your understanding of computers and the operating system. In order to use the terminal effectively, you need to learn more about technical concepts like files, pipes, stdin etc. than when you are purely working with graphical tools. This is, of course, useful for every IT person, especially when you are working on more technical / system-level tasks at a later point.

In summary, you should embrace the usage of your terminal. Naturally, there is some learning curve that might feel steep at the beginning. However, stick with it for a while, and it will pay off soon.

What is your relationship with the terminal?

#SoftwareDeveloper #Terminal #CommandLine #Shell