mc

[Les Mikesell]

Tim wrote:

>> How much work is it to type a 2 character command? 
> 
> But that's not it, is it?  It's far more than typing in a command.
> Typing ls, or mv, doesn't get me anywhere.  I have to cd to where the
> files are, probably do mkdir a few times with a cd or two thrown in.
> I've got to come up with a sane wildcard to move a collection of files,
> or individually list a slew of files with no commonalities between them,
> type in paths to move them too, ad infinitum.

But, but, but... Having a slew of files with no commonalities doesn't 
just happen by itself.  Complaining about that is like throwing all your 
papers on the floor together and then wondering why they are hard to 
organize.  If you name files sanely or group them in directories related 
to how you want to manipulate them, a simple command and wildcard will 
likely do what you want with them in one quick operation.

> Anybody who suggests that using the command line is far less work than
> using a GUI has never used a decent GUI-based file manager. 

Or they use naming conventions and more than one directory.

> A GUI tool
> is about the only way to easily move arbitrary files about.

Yes, if you have to clean up an existing mess, pointing and clicking on 
each file individually may be the best you can do.  If you have a lot of 
files, that's still going to be slow and painful.  Maybe you don't 
actually have a large number of files.

 > The fact
> that Linux has crap GUI file tools, in general, doesn't make the CLI
> superior in itself.

What's the problem with opening several nautilus windows, 
control-clicking a bunch of files in one window and dragging to one of 
the others?  Unless you have thousands of files, of course.  On my 
desktop box: find / | wc -l
3202471
so I'm not that interested in clicking on all of them or even trying to 
read the names in a GUI tool.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com