Oh My God, I Get It


[Oh my God, I get it.](https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=30Ysa3A2WMU)

When I was first getting into Linux a couple years ago, I often came across discussions about the terminal: the advantages and disadvantages of terminal VS GUI programs, whether or not one was better than the other, etc. Sometimes people had very strong opinions about this. But the idea I took from it was this: doing a job in the terminal isn't as intuitive as a GUI, but if you build muscle memory, you can do things so blazingly fast that you'll never want to go back.

Over the last two years I've adjusted to using the terminal at least half of the time, but it hasn't been my preferred way of interacting with the computer, just a way that I'm comfortable doing if I have to.

But I get it now.

I'm currently SSH'd into tilde.team, reading some blog posts with lynx. I make extensive use of bookmarks[0], and wanted to do the same with lynx. When you have dozens to hundreds of links bookmarked, it becomes very important to sort them into folders - the three most common for me are "helpful stuff," "cool websites," and "to read."

I've never used lynx before, so it wasn't plainly obvious how to accomplish this. I knew that lynx saved bookmarks to a file, and figured it woudln't be difficult to configure multiple files. I looked in the options menu and saw that there is indeed a multi-bookmark option. I set it to STANDARD, and then... didn't immediately know how to tell lynx what files to use, and where to put them (I would prefer they be in a hidden directory, because I like to keep things visually uncluttered).

Don't get me wrong, it didn't take too much searching and reading to figure out how. It just wasn't obvious to me without looking it up, as someone who had never used lynx before. By contrast, I didn't have to look up how to create folders to save bookmarks in Firefox. There's a certain friction to having to look things up that I feel the instinctive urge to avoid, which is why I often won't choose the terminal if I don't have to.

But then I started actually bookmarking links. Since I only really use three folders, it wasn't very hard to figure out the necessary sequence of keypresses. And it took less than a second. *Less than a second*. ***Less than a second!***. And that's when it really clicked for me: if I could bookmark things this way in firefox... I would. I would never look back.

So, to all the people who kept telling me that the terminal is blazingly fast once you get used to it: you were right. I get it now.

[0] For a long while now I've had firefox configured to close all tabs when I'm done browsing. This doesn't stop clutter from building up, it just forces me to be intentional about it. But it means I have to rely on bookmarks to find things later.

tags: terminal, web-browsing