[bhanks]

Typing is always going to be faster than clicking around in an interface. Take the time to learn it. There was a time when command line was also for "mere mortals". What moved us away from that? Windows. Something to think about.

[mixmax]

I respectfully disagree.

moving around a filesystem for instance, in a GUI based tool I click on a folder and view it's contents. In a commandline tool I type an often long path, hit enter and view a list of files and/or folders in that particular folder. If I want to move up or down I issue another command that I have to type. I don't get any visual cues as to where I am in the structure either.

I fail to see how typing 20 letters and hitting enter is easier than one click with a mouse. In respect to histoory I think that what happened was that normal users moved on to a more intuitive and faster interface for normal things.

[beatgammit]

How often are you "moving up and down" on the command-line? I usually have a few terminals open to common places that I need to be (or tabs, if that's how you roll) all with command histories applicable to each task.

Instead of 20 letters, just type the first couple, tab complete (z-shell makes this fluid) and hit enter. If some directories have a single sub directory, it's just tab-tab-tab and you're at the base.

To get a "visual cue", type pwd or have a setting for your shell that follows your directory path.

You can also set up aliases or shell variables for common paths. This has the benefit of not being cluttered (like shortcuts on a desktop) while allowing you to "cd essays" instead of "cd documents/writing/essays".

Also, there's the benefit of find/grep. If you can't remember where a file is, but you know generally where it is, cd there, find "part-you-remember" or grep -R "some unique text" and you'll get your answer soon enough. This has the benefit over full desktop search in that you get local results, so you may have to only sift through 3 or 4 "README" files instead of dozens.

Sometimes I use a graphical file browser, but mostly for images. For that, I use nautilus. But I can open nautilus from my current directory. For example, to get to my code, I can just "cd project-name; nautilus ." (having set up a variable) instead of trying to navigate there from /.

I'm not saying GUI tools are bad; I'm saying that for many tasks, the command-line is more efficient, but a GUI tool is just a command away.