What's so special about the command line?

Modified on 17th Feb, 2020 Tom Hazledine

What is a CLI, and what is a GUI? What are the key differences? And why would you choose one over the other? Are there tasks that cannot be accomplished in the command line?

The command line has a steep perceived learning curve, so is it worth the time-investment to learn properly? And is there any benefit to switching to a non-standard shell or terminal application? What are "bash" and "zsh"? Find out all this and more in this week's favorable instalment of A Question of Code.

Mentioned in this episode:

• hackertyper.net
• Terminal emulators
• Episode #35: What is version control? (GIT)
• SourceTree
• z-shell ("zsh")
• iTerm2
• Lynx: a command-line web browser

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