Commentary on file managers vs terminal/command line

[Ralf Mardorf]

Hi,

even the few very good file managers could get broken after an upgrade.
Even an upgrade of a theme could render a file manager useless, let
alone that there could be serious bugs in the code of a file manager. A
user could lose files! Thunar is know for serious bugs and upstream
doesn't fix those serious bugs. Reading the Nautilus thread users claim
slow performance. I noticed this for newer releases of Rodent, too.
Note, Rodent does use regular shell commands, a user could edit those
commands, so some GUI crap adds the slowness. At least when using
Rodent, other than when using Thunar, Nautilus and other, you know what
commands are used, so the user could be aware, if an operation is
atomic or not.

Users are never surprised when used to the terminal. Even non-atomic
operations don't come with an opaque layer, so you unlikely will lose a
file, unless you make an user error or there should be a power outage
during a non-atomic operation.

The terminal is user friendly, even without remembering short-cuts.

There's a histroy, if you use the cursor up and down keys, you could
use readline ( https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/readline#History )
to search the history, or as I do by a script and/or alias instead of
using readline.

The tab key's could be used to auto-complete, you do not need to type
everything.

I usually don't use the following, but you even could replace or add
something to the command you used before:

[rocketmouse at archlinux ~]$ tree -d audio*
audio-projects
└── New Project

1 directory
[rocketmouse at archlinux ~]$ ^tree^ls
ls -d audio*
audio-projects
[rocketmouse at archlinux ~]$ sudo !!
sudo ls -d audio*
[sudo] password for rocketmouse: 
audio-projects

What I do use a lot are aliases. If you put an alias to ~/.bashrc you
could adapt commands to your needs.

[rocketmouse at archlinux ~]$ grep ls= .bashrc 
alias ls='ls --color=auto'

or add completely new commands

[rocketmouse at archlinux ~]$ grep cda= .bashrc 
alias cda='cd /var/cache/aur/ && ls -hAl'

Some short-cuts are easy to remember, once you start using them, e.g.
Ctrl+L runs "clear" ("C+L"ear).

Very seldom I use a file manager, but usually not to list, move,
rename, delete or copy files. I e.g. use spacefm with a tool I added by
a shell script, so I could select a file and by short-cut or menu split
an audio file from e.g. stereo to separated left and right mono files.

To list, move, rename, delete or copy files the command line offers
bash globbing, assuming the login shell is bash, which is quasi the
default for all well known Linux distros.

Do yourself a favour, get used to command line, get rid of file
managers for tasks such as list, move, rename, delete and copy and to
add a directory and to delete a directory, or file, or soft link.

After a very short learning curve you get used to command line and you
never ever will consider to use a file manager for this kine of work
any more.

I didn't forget to mention a search command for files (find), because
most of the times globbing is all we need.

A few hints related to "ls", very useful are

-h, --human-readable
-A, --almost-all
-d, --directory
-v  natural sort of (version) numbers within text

Two hints related to cp:

-a
-i

One hint related to mv and rm:

-i

and an additional hint related to rm:

-I

Regards,
Ralf

-- 
from Oberhausen, Ruhrgebiet
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/germany-arrests-two-men-over-suspected-shopping-centre-attack-plot-1.2916361

Strang, "they" always claim that there's percental not more crime done
by migrants from some regions, than done by other, such as
Netherlanders, Frenchmen, Americans, Italians, Spanish, Germans etc.,
but I can't remember Netherlanders, Frenchmen, Americans, Italians,
Spanish, Germans doing a Christmas market truck attack. AFAIK we don't
have any no-go areas in the Ruhrgebiet of Netherlands, French,
American, Italian, Spanish, German clans, but actually we have got
several no-go areas in the Ruhrgebiet. Yes, we also have .e.g. a
German Neo-Nazi area and e.g. Italian Mafia heartlands in the
Ruhrgebiet, but those are far away of being no-go areas. There is
quasi no xenophobia or Islamophobia in the Ruhrgebiet, nearly
everybody welcomes migrants, me too! Some Islamic clans simply decided
to be evil, there's no excuse!