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Discussion on: Why you need Terminal

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Albrecht Scheidig

I like your engagement. And I also like the direction of your engagement: motivating developers to get used to the shell / terminal.

You could, however, add some more concrete and compelling examples to highlight what the shell is doing for you that other tools cannot do. Or add some neat tricks you are aware of. Developers are always keen on neat tricks :-)

In my day jobs, I have always been a developer using Windows OS. Having a background on linux, I have always looked for solutions to leverage a powerful, bash style command line on windows. I used cygwin for a decade. I built a virtual machine running ubuntu that shares the data partition with the windows host. Currently, I use git bash most of the time, which is fast, lightweight and easy to install on a new box.

Junior (Windows) developers are often not used to the idea to leave the IDE, open a shell, running cryptic commands. But they are willing to learn the advantages. Cryptic commands can be saved in scripts. Scripts can be parameterized to make them available for broader use. Those scripts can be shared using git. A whole new shiny world. A set of tools to make you more efficient. An environment that supports platform independence and tool chain (think of Continuous Integration, automated installation and upgrade etc.)