Nah, it's (type + remember) speed that makes command lines frustrating. They're only fast if you use them constantly or write scripts. As soon as you have to look up an argument order or a command flag, you've lost all that efficiency.

Bash completion is still pretty fast for most commands. If you need --help or man, it will slow you down considerably

Slowdown will turn fairly quickly into a major speedup if you're trying to do operations on multiple files.

Most of the speedup of automating repetative flows can be recovered using a program like AutoHotKey.

You can also configure zsh to show you all the autocomplete options (files/directories, flags, command-specific arguments like git tags, etc.) and tab/arrow key through them visually: http://i47.tinypic.com/2qtwxnn.gif

(The gif is a little slow, but you can obviously move through them a fast as you can hit the keys)

In my experience, the slowdown is usually not remembering the command, but remembering, say, whether you want -f, -F, --force, --hard or some other option for this particular command.

Even common commands have this problem — for example, I don't copy files all that much, so when I do, I frequently forget that cp takes -R instead of -r.

doesn't cp take -r,-R or --recursive? or is it OS specific? in Ubuntu or CentOS I believe they're all the same

It's program specific. The vast majority of linux distros come with GNU cp, which takes either. BSD's version of cp only takes -R, Mac's too I suppose since it's BSD-based.

The annoying ones on linux are chmod/chown, they take -R only.

EDIT: it's OS specific in the sense that these programs follow the OS's convention, I expect BusyBox cp, a lightweight Linux version of cp, has the same options as GNU cp

chmod is that way because ambiguity... -r is take away read...

POSIX only specifies -R. Actual implementations of cp can include whatever nonstandard arguments they want, such as -r in GNU cp.

thanks a lot, gotta read more about POSIX ^^

> Visual programming wouldn't be 'visual' without GUI.

Have you heard of one of the most popular visual editor called 'vi' (short form of 'visual')?

But of couse I don't use it. Once you know Emacs well, you won't either. :-)

> if someone has a command-line-driven video rendering editor, let me know - I want to explore this.

There is a linear editor called AviSynth that's relatively popular and very Windows-based.

Fully open source and cross platform: mpv (or mplayer) + aalib in conjunction with ffmpeg.

It'd be hard to do more than cutting frames out with that.

Wait, does anyone actually use the aalib output? I thought it was a joke.

>Subjective

Straight up.

apt-get /pip /equivalents are all astonishingly efficient methods of installing programs. Have seen many non-tech inclined people change their mind quickly once being exposed to it.

Perhaps we should be asking people to try first? A gui is a necessity in certain situations, but it shouldn't be lore.

Demand more and you will get more.