This is one of the rare delightful articles. I came to understand, after 6 years of non-programming work, and now back in front of the console, that what I like the most is the freedom that the shell provides and the room for creativity when accomplishing a task in a readable composition of tools in one line.

Certainly the provided successors of the Bourne shell might be more elegant. Certainly when piping data through several tools needs often transformation of the data representation to match the required input format. Sometimes the transformation uses different principles (regular expressions, shell wildcards, awk, sed, ..) which pollutes the logical flow of problem resolution. But I came to the conclusion that despite not being optimal, this data transformation noise holds information that, when reading or when needing to explain to others, helps to understand, or maybe remember the data model from the source to the sinks. However I believe, more uniform but more universal data transformation techniques would be a progress.

Until now this comment is more about shell than terminals, but for me, these are the biggest advantages of working on a command line - freedom and creativity in the usage of available tools.

Now, to come closer to the terminal aspect.

I am a typing fan. I went through hell when moving from Germany to France and having to re-learn a new keyboard layout - none of the both layouts are good, but if you are used to one it is very annoying to get to used to another. After having had some missions in other countries with different keyboard layouts, I found a solution, that is in line with my philosophy of using typing tools: Learn US keyboard layout, to the point to use it blindly without needing letters on the keys - it is installed on all OSes in all countries. At home use the extension US International with AltGr dead keys - I can now write all German, French, Turk and many other Latin based accents with a single layout. When in mission at a customer I ask if in the open session I can switch to US layout (if needed) - until now there were only some raised eyebrows, but no objections. And at least for ThinkPads you can order them with US layout, even with the € sign. So for keyboard I tackled the problem.

For text editors I resolved the problem already 10 years ago. I use VIM. VI is on all UNIXes, VIM is on Windows (I did not yet have to work on Macs).

On the UNIX shell the first thing I type is: set -o vi
Like this many VI shortcuts and commands are at the command line.

One quote in the article made me smile the most:

"... However, it’s worth noting that we don’t avoid the mouse because it is slow — if one wants to move the cursor to an arbitrary location elsewhere on the screen, one can often do so faster with a mouse than a keyboard. The problem is the transition from the keyboard to the mouse. It’s an expensive context switch, which should not be done lightly. ..."

Yeah, this is the reason I use a track point instead of a mouse. Nothing to care with you, takes no space and you don't have to lift your hands from the keyboard. The only problem is the craving when having to sit at a customer at a keyboard that has not track point - I find myself sometimes searching for it with the fingers until I realize that I am not on my ThinkPad. It is a shame this device is disappearing on most computers.

At last: I think what unites the aficionados of the command line is the choice to spend more effort and time in learning tools which are more difficult than their alternatives (mouse vs. track point, command line vs. GUI, ten finger typing vs. two finger typing) at the beginning but pay big times off in efficiency in the long run and as a plus give the pleasure of creativity and freedom.

I encourage the author of the article to progress with his ideas! We absolutely need innovation in this space. It is just that the bar is huge because of all the tools we became used to.