5 reasons to be happy in a terminal

I am not talking about an airport terminal, but about one of the terminal emulators which are provided by modern window managers, like gnome-terminal for Gnome and the similar Konsole for Kde, along with the minimal xterm. These are all unix applications but equivalent applications exist for other platforms like Windows, although their integration with the underlying operating system and with specific programs can be tricky.
Why should you, a software developer/engineer, want to pass most of your time in a dumb terminal instead of in a powerful and costly IDE? I have five reasons to convince you.

• instant access to unix programs. GUIs facilitate the job of naive users but the real power resides in the command line tools which perform the real work; moreover, cli programs can be chained in infinite ways using their universal plain text interface.
• the classic 80x25 terminal has short lines and a short number of lines: too much logic in a line stands out because the line wraps on the subsequent one. Too long methods are spotted as well, because they don't fit in a single or double screen and require multiple scrolling.
• transparent remoting with ssh. The same can be said for VNC, but it can be very slow and it's not always supported while many servers have a ssh daemon. It is so fast I did not notice the latency between my local machine and other boxes in my Lan, so I have given them different colored prompts to easily distinguish between environments.
  
• uninterrupted flow; not using the mouse makes you move very quickly in the cli environment, once you know what to write and how to leverage the text- based tools.
  
• every executed command is registered for possible future repetition and modification. Try record a procedure of 90 control panel clicks instead.

As a side note, thanks to history, it's also very simple to calculate statistics on which are the most popular commands you type on your development box:

[12:29:32][giorgio@Indy:~]$ history | awk '{print $2;}' | sort | uniq -c |
> sort -nr | head -n 10
   4924 vim
   1326 svn
    879 nakedphpunit    // it's an alias for phpunit --bootstrap=...
    616 sudo
    438 cd
    266 ls
    238 osstest_sqlite
    207 phing
    135 ./scripts/regenerate
    127 grep

Of course most of them were only typed the first time and then recalled. From these data you can infer that I use the command line interface a lot, and I've never been more productive. This statistic is a typical leverage of command line tools in a construct that took me less than a minute to write and that I can repeat whenever I want in a few seconds.

Sooner or later, the time comes when a developer feels constrained by his graphical interfaces and resorts to use the command line directly. If he avoids the command line, probably it's because he does not know how to work with it. Don't be so proud like this developer and take some time to learn: the cli will repay you soon.