Comments on: Being a console geek in Linux

By: Morten Juhl-Johansen ZÃ¶lde-FejÃ©r

Morten Juhl-Johansen ZÃ¶lde-FejÃ©r — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 16:46:00 +0000

… and then you buy a Thinkpad, and everything is moved somewhere else, because the Ctrl key – your friend for Ctrl-tab – has gone off the usual spot…

By: edivimo

edivimo — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 14:11:50 +0000

“and shift-alt-tab to cycle backwards”

With that I impressed my friends who knowed Alt+Tab…

By: Gray Gaffer

Gray Gaffer — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 03:24:21 +0000

For a bit of fun context, I recommend “In The Beginning was the Command Line”.

Apart from the GAK factor, should you ever need to get into your machine from a distance, there are only two ways to do it: VNC*, and ssh**. VNC attempts to replicate the GUI desktop on your remote machine. Unless you have gobs of bandwidth in your connection, this will basically suck and is for emergencies only. ssh (Secure Shell) OTOH is light and snappy and gives you the standard CLI on your remote machine, as many of them as you want, and you get all the GAK-iness you desire. ssh has other tricks up its sleeve too, enough to warrant its own discussion.

This thread from Greg is quite Linux-oriented. But be aware that you also get cli on Windows in two flavors – horribly broken DOS cli, and moderately OK *nix cli that comes with cygwin. Mac OS X of course is as good as Linux in this respect because it is basically Free BSD, and you can get both the OS X native Terminal and X-windows xterm for your cli delights.

* if you are shackled to a PC you might also have RDP, which is actually slightly faster than VNC because it knows some of the underlying OS short cuts in the display manager.

** along with ssh is telnet. Both give you the same cli, but telnet is open and vulnerable to attack, while ssh encrypts your chats.

By: MadScientist

MadScientist — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 02:01:37 +0000

Tom Clancy popout? Oh, if only … in reality whenever I go to demonstrations of some wonderful system or other I have a very hard time not giggling all the time because apps rely too much on the mouse or that horrible touchpad whereas some very old systems accomplished similar tasks via a few keystrokes and an experienced user could operate things very quickly. It seems that people have got it in their heads that a mouse is essential and they don’t care to think about the best way to drive this highly specialized software. Touch screens maybe (but they have their own problems), but the mouse? – it’s a sure sign the developers are clueless.

By: James

James — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 23:45:30 +0000

Your “Tom Clancy” reference reminded me of the Hollywood OS. It’s only useful if you’re operating at 20 columns. Security is awesome, until you type “Override”.

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20010111

By: Wyatt

Wyatt — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 22:16:34 +0000

and shift-alt-tab to cycle backwards

By: edivimo

edivimo — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 22:05:27 +0000

“…you can learn to be more keyboardy and thus probably save yourself some time and impress your friends.”

You’re right, I impressed a lot of my friends with my keyboardy way of alternating windows with Alt+Tab…