Just a few days ago I began the Terminal Test. The idea is to put up a tweet/ident (what do you call an update on Identi.ca?) every time I use the terminal explaining what I used it for and how it could be avoided. Since then, I have used the terminal a number of times. The experiment is not over, but I wanted to give an update on what is going on.

Many people have commented that they consider the terminal an important and powerful part of Linux and do not want to see it taken away. I agree and do (as evidenced by the posts I have made so far) use the terminal just to save time on occasion. I do not, however, believe that a new user (or, for that matter, any user) should be forced in to using the terminal and not given a graphical option. Sure the power of the terminal is great, but there has to be a simpler way for new users to become familiar with Linux.

Looking at the posts so far, all of them fit in to one of these categories: a tutorial instructed the use of the terminal, the terminal was used because it was faster, or I was doing something development-related. Two of those categories I have no concern about. Without radical changes to the way graphical interfaces work, typing in a command is going to be faster than navigating through menus, so I see no issue with using the terminal to speed up something that could be done with the graphical interface. I also don’t really care that some development work requires or works better in the terminal. Seriously, if you can write code you should be able to use the terminal. Perhaps basic HTML/CSS would be an exception, but you don’t really have to use the terminal for that sort of thing. (On a side note, I do think that the Bazaar developers should fix this bug, but that’s just a personal annoyance.*)

The category here which is a consistent annoyance of mine is the “I was following a tutorial and it said to do this.” I will admit that I myself may be guilty of this, but it really bothers me when tutorial authors advise the use of the terminal when it is really not needed. In this specific example, I needed to open a .chm file, so I did a Google search. The tutorial I found instructed me to run “sudo apt-get install gnochm.” It could, however, have said to go to Synaptic and install “gnochm.” That would have been less disto-independent and harder to write, but it does make a better impression on a new user. Granted, I don’t know the context of the site I found. The intended audience makes a big difference, but, as a general rule, I would like to see more tutorials focus on how to get things done using graphical tools.

Remember to follow twitter.com/terminaltest or identi.ca/terminaltest!

* Yes, I know that someone is going to say “well, why don’t you fix it?” I can do HTML/CSS (leading to the existance of this site) and bit of other stuff, but I can’t do any real development.

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