The command line comeback
Sat, 2007-01-06 03:52
Lifehacker has a great article about the comeback of the command line: "Geek to Live: The command line comeback".
It is one of the best articles I've seen explaining the difference between a GUI and CLI in terms of easy of use versus efficiency and one of the more convincing ones for the fact that CLI is not dead and that indeed it is actually gaining steam in new and interesting ways.
This reminds me of ideas Taco (tbuitenh) has for new kinds of user interfaces which would combine the best of both the CLI and GUI into the perfect balance between ease and efficiency.
And we have a whole forum here dedicated just for command line computing! 
Rather interesting. The command line is indeed a useful thing, I tend to always start X, but I always have a terminal open somewhere to move files, play media or launch programs. I see Taco's ideas for UIs rather interesting, since typing is much faster than type-mouse-type etc.
I use GUI and CLI interchangeably as well (terminal emulator within X). I think that is currently the most efficient and convenient combination.
I also think that using the CLI within the GUI is the best combination.
We propably all use a lot of programs that require X (like Konqueror or Firefox to write down our OpenThoughts ;-) here, although of course we could also use Lynx for it).
Of course you can switch out of X to a "real shell", but it's much more convinient to use Konsole, XTerm or something like that.
I like viewing directories in Konqueror, but usually I have a shell-window besides that where I do operations like moving or other stuff.
There will propably always be tasks you can better do in the shell, especially when it comes to piping commands. Also I didn't find a really good GUI for IPTables yet. The problem here might just be that IPTables allows really complex things, which would need a GUI with huge windows to offer all options. Which then would be more confusing to the user than it would help I guess.
But there are also always tasks which are much easier in a GUI. Of course you can write 20 lines of code to render a simple cube in Povray, but you can also just fire up Blender and press F12 to have it rendered. ;-) And browsing the Internet is also much more enjoyable in a nice browser like Konqueror or Firefox than using Lynx, although it is a good and sometimes really useful browser.
You've summarized it nicely reptiler.
I like to use X with no taskbar, panel, or nothing. Just a term window, almost maximized, trans, no border/title bar or anything so its kinda like xcli i guess.
cutting it down short, I use GUIs when I need to. CLI preferred.
Ah I love the command line, gets things done so much more efficiently