How I use my terminal

As someone that was happy that I could finally afford owning computers with a graphics display on them, this going back to the terminal doesn't stop surprising me.

We still do horses, but hardly anyone is favouring them for travelling around the continent delivering mail.

Kudos to the people that would rather experience that, I guess.

> We still do horses, but hardly anyone is favouring them for travelling around the continent delivering mail.

Except that if you've ever seen someone who truly knows how to use a terminal, you'd be surprised how many times faster he can work than with any other UI-based workflow.

This may change with AI, but so far I'm not holding my breath.

Literally twenty minutes ago, I had to submit several hospital invoices for insurance claims. The website, despite claiming it'd accept PDFs, didn't consider the PDFs I uploaded valid, but somehow PNGs worked. My first thought was 'let's script the conversion', but then I realised there were only six PDFs, so I opened Acrobat, and used keyboard navigation to run through the menus to export all PDFs to PNGs. Done in two minutes flat.

Had I chosen to script it, I would probably still be hunting for the CLI to convert PDFs to PNGs. Sometimes, the trade-off is not so clear.

fd -e pdf -x magick {} {/}.png

Took less than a minute to write, test, and get the right dependencies (nix-shell -p imagemagick ghostscript). Scales to any number of pdfs.

The terminal just wins probably 95% of the time as long as you know about available tools.