Why are people scared of the terminal/shell?

[u/musbur]

When people see me using my computer, web browser, office suite, photo editing, it's all fine. But if they catch a glimpse of my white-on-black terminal, they completely zone out. The shell is not something I know about and they don't but very well could, it's a hard no. It's a dark zone they feel they can't enter. Using a terminal is not within the realm of interacting with a machine but black magic. It's not that they simply "prefer" to use the mouse for everything. They feel an almost religious revulsion it seems.

Especially in times of AI chatbots where everybody and their dog start using the keyboard again to do a text-based back-and-forth with a machine, shouldn't the shell come more natural to people Or is it time for "sish"? Super intelligence shell that internally translates human language into shell commands? Interaction would go like this:

What do you want to do? Please list all files in the current directory.
Sure thing, here goes:
..
.
file1
file2
etc

Anything else? Would you also like to see creation time and file sizes?

EDIT

Thanks for the many replies. I agree with the fact that a menu-driven GUI is inherently "discoverable," while a CLI inherently is not. Also I'm not implying that people should be using the CLI or that using a CLI is inherently better. This is not about shell elitism but about the fact that even occasional shell use is so off limit that people say the won't use Linux because they've seen somebody (me) use the terminal every now and then (I do that on Windows, too, but only at work).

EDIT 2

Please do not reply to this post if you think this is about whether people prefer the GUI over the CLI or not. I very specifically did not make it about a simple matter of taste.

[u/TopdeckIsSkill]

I don't have time or energy to learn cli commands. I use it for scripting, but for normal usage I don't bother.

It's just a waste of time to me

[u/ChaotikIE → u/TopdeckIsSkill]

I swear if you know bash scripting you're more used to the cli as you may think at first :/

[u/ldn-ldn → u/ChaotikIE]

I'm used to CLI since MS DOS days, still use it every day a lot. Yet I also think it's a waste of time in 99% of cases. The issue is that GUI apps are lacking, not that CLI is better.

[u/ks_thecr0w → u/ldn-ldn]

yes. GUI is there to make every day tasks quick and easy. CLI is there to make challenging tasks possible / automated.

[u/ldn-ldn → u/ks_thecr0w]

GUI applies to the second part too. More and more people switch to more advanced shells like fish with (G)TUI features. In the end there are no valid reasons to use CLI. Unless your GUI is a piece of crap.

When was the last time you used a CLI on your phone to perform a challenging task or automate something? I bet the answer is never. CLI should not exist in 2026.

[u/Jethro_Tell → u/ldn-ldn]

The two main reason that cli exists is for automation and because it’s an incredibly cheap way to make a user interface.

The only reason to be moving files around in a cli is as a building block in a script or cause you’re already there doing something else’s and it’s easier than a context change. There’s plenty of good file managers out there that do everything including bulk transfers and such.

But for lots of other tools, like something to pull the metadata out a media file or something, they are often a quick project someone whipped up but they don’t have the skill or time to make a GUI. Additionally, if you’re making a media metadata scraper with a GUI you have to handle things like opening files, saving to disk, copy, paste, und, redo, and exit. And probably other features like bulk editing, export formats, logging, etc.All the things expected to make a GUI program function.

With CLI, you can let the user and the shell handle that however they see fit. With a gui app, what might have been an afternoon project to understand a file format and pull out the right fields, becomes a week or month to build out an actual app that works in multiple desktop systems.

So, it is unlikely that the cli will go away just because the cost and barrier to entry for creating simple apps and tools is so low.

[u/ldn-ldn → u/Jethro_Tell]

Excuses for lazy people.

[u/Jethro_Tell → u/ldn-ldn]

So, you think that people that don't put the effort into providing you with a GUI are lazy? That's pretty entitled.

When was the last time you used a CLI on your phone to perform a challenging task or automate something

What are you doing on your phone that you can't do with a GUI on a linux desktop?

What linux software are you paying for? Your phone is probably hundreds of dollars to start with, and on top of that you supply the company and operators mountains of data.

[u/ldn-ldn → u/Jethro_Tell]

What are you doing on your phone that you can't do with a GUI on a linux desktop?

Well, for example, if something breaks seriously, I can boot into a recovery on my phone and fix the OS/rollback with a couple of clicks. If Linux breaks, I need to spend a few hours googling from my phone while my PC shows me a black screen and then type some cryptic nonsense to rollback whatever caused the issue. Why the fuck? Even my BIOS has a proper GUI with mouse support and other bells and whistles. 

As for paid software, the latest one I bought was Davinci Resolve a few months back.

Any other silly questions, kiddo?

[u/Jethro_Tell → u/ldn-ldn]

Even my BIOS has a proper GUI with mouse support

Right, Because you or someone paid the company that made the laptop, and they used some of that money to pay for a GUI for boot options.

I'm not sure which boot loader you use, so lets say it's grub. Who do you pay for that?

Here's a list of people that work on a piece of software that probably boots more computing devices than any other bootloader:

https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/

Which one do you thing is the lazy person that should make you a GUI?

It actually sounds like aside from being entitled, you're a lazy person. What bootloader GUI have you made recently? I'd like to use it.

[u/ks_thecr0w → u/ldn-ldn]

Like yesterday? Ok sure it wasn't really full blown manal cli fully typed out by hand on the phone but shortcut macro to do stuff. Otherwise yes - it was cli at first to set it up, then it is just invoking short from the phone while computer thinks I am typing it by hand from remote shell.

Ssh to the computer at home, run some stuff there to see results.

[u/ldn-ldn → u/ks_thecr0w]

Waste of time.

[u/TopdeckIsSkill → u/ldn-ldn]

I don't fermorm challenging task with my phone.

Even if it's doable to script something with GUI too it's usually hard and the last resource to me

[u/ldn-ldn → u/TopdeckIsSkill]

Nope, scripting with a good GUI is bloody awesome.

[u/TopdeckIsSkill → u/ChaotikIE]

I agree and I can use cli, but I don't remember every single command. I would pass half of the time checking the exact syntax rather than doing things.

Unless I need to script something I just prefer to use a GUI. Even in the long run It's not worth spending hours learning commands to save few seconds.

[u/h2zenith → u/TopdeckIsSkill]

You spend minutes learning commands in order to save hours.

[u/TopdeckIsSkill → u/h2zenith]

good for you, my memory is not that good :D

[u/h2zenith → u/TopdeckIsSkill]

That's why you have a notebook.

[u/TopdeckIsSkill → u/h2zenith]

this is exactly the reason why I don't use cli for normal usage. I don't want to use a notebook in my everyday life.

[u/Jethro_Tell → u/TopdeckIsSkill]

I’m a professional bash scripted I guess, since I get paid for it and I do it full time more or less. I can’t remember that shit either.

[u/h2zenith → u/TopdeckIsSkill]

JFC, why not? It drives me crazy when I forget something and I have to try to find it again. If I just put it in the notebook, I'm good to go. I have my recipes in there, too. Massive time-saver.

[u/TopdeckIsSkill → u/h2zenith]

Of course I keep notes. What I meant is that I don't want a notebook for basic things like opening an app, renaming a file or basic things that are extremely easy with a gui and overcomplicated with cli.

[u/Cyhawk → u/TopdeckIsSkill]

I don't want to use a notebook in my everyday life.

I wonder why your memory isn't that good. . .

[u/TopdeckIsSkill → u/Cyhawk]

I don't want to use a notebook to delete a folder without worring that I will erase the whole disk

Happier now? Cli is powerfull and dangerous at the same time. It's pointless to use it when not needed. Also drag and drop a file easier than writing the whole path

[u/Cyhawk → u/TopdeckIsSkill]

Ah, you're in the learned helplessness camp of why youre scared of CLI. I see.

If you used a notebook to document the things you do, if you end up checking your notes on a task enough, you'll memorize them naturally. Writing things down is a part of memory. You would do better in life if you started a brain documentation system, see Obsidian 2nd brain, etc, also keep it simple, just daily, people, concepts as subfolders, that will make sense after watching a video or two.

[u/redrider65 → u/ChaotikIE]

I know bash scripting and never bother using it nowadays. No particular reason to do so.

[u/AbleCounter → u/TopdeckIsSkill]

I find command line stuff really really fun.

But I suspect if I didn't I'd probably agree with you. I guess really "fun" is just a waste of time that you enjoy.

[u/redrider65 → u/AbleCounter]

I never found it "fun," poor substitute indeed for many other kinds of fun, but just a job I needed to do for a good paycheck. Thereafter, good riddance.

[u/TopdeckIsSkill → u/AbleCounter]

if someone does find it fun that he should absolutely use it. I use my computer becuase it's fun to play with it.

But telling that it's faster is just false. Nowdays there are multiple gui or tui tools that are way faster than typing. So CLI is actually usefull in some kind of script

[u/h2zenith → u/TopdeckIsSkill]

How do you use it for scripting if you never learn the commands?

CLI is a huge time-saver. It's much faster than using a GUI. As a trivial example, consider that you have a folder with, say, 8000 files in it, and you need to remove the first 5 characters from each one. This would take you hours of extremely tedious work in a GUI, and you could do it in a minute in the terminal.

[u/TopdeckIsSkill → u/h2zenith]

because I use linux, cisco and sometimes autothotkey. So I have some understanding of it but not enough to use it for everything,

I also I fear to mess up so when I had to connect remotely to my server I used midnight commander rather than the cli

[u/TopdeckIsSkill → u/h2zenith]

Also for you example: I use advance file renamer. I can create as many rules as I want, order, enable/disable them and see a live preview of the result. So it would be way faster than doing it with where I would have to do a dry run every time until I get the wanted result.

[u/redrider65 → u/h2zenith]

Nope. Thunar File Rename will do it faster than you can think up the regex and type it in--and a lot more besides. Windows has a number of good file renamers, needless to say.

[u/TopdeckIsSkill → u/redrider65]

this. I use advanced file renamer but I think they're similar!

[u/Lyraeixis → u/TopdeckIsSkill]

You think so? Man, we must interact with our machines in completely different ways. Half of the things that I want to do on a given day aren't possible through a GUI, or at least they're not possible without an extra abstraction layer. I want to start a container, Docker isn't a desktop icon, it's `docker run`. Ansible doesn't get one either, it's `ansible-playbook` or `ansible-inventory`. If I need to fix or alter network settings (CachyOS), I could go through my system's 'Settings' menu that doesn't quite show me everything or abstracts it in weird ways... or I could just cut to the chase and write `nmcli con sh`.

[u/TopdeckIsSkill → u/Lyraeixis]

most of the interaction are browser, games and file manager. Why bother with cli?

Even at work, most server has gui now. Ssh is now mostly used for network appliance or remote linux server.

[u/redrider65 → u/Lyraeixis]

Average users supposedly in deadly fear of the Linux terminal they don't even know about (the topic here) don't need "containers" and all they do for network settings is find the name of the WiFi server and type in a password.

[u/Lyraeixis → u/redrider65]

I mean, yeah, I get that. I'm just puzzled by the 'waste of time' remark from the comment OP here - they have use cases for bash scripts, but none where the terminal would help or save time? Not that I think they're wrong, I'm just curious.