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what about just using butler?
Authored by: Chevron on Jun 24, '04 09:53:53AM

could someone please explain to me what seems to be an obsession of people's to use the terminal to do absolutely everything. It seems to me most of the time typing commands and saving shell scripts takes a lot longer than using GUI apps, I mean GUI apps are designed to give us quick and easy access to the information we want, WITHOUT having to type commands into a console window as per the terminal..

I haven't learned how to use the terminal properly, and would like to know why the terminal is preferable in an instance such as the above hint, as opposed to a powerful app such as butler...



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what about just using butler?
Authored by: gshenaut on Jun 24, '04 11:37:00PM

It's kind of a faith-based thingy. Some people believe the opposite of what you said: the terminal window exists to allow people to circumvent the inconveniences of the GUI.

Chacun à son goût

Greg Shenaut



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what about just using butler?
Authored by: alys on Jun 25, '04 02:56:47AM
If you were working in a program other than Terminal and wanted to open an application, then you are right that it would be faster to use the Applications folder or a launcher such as Butler. However if you're already working in Terminal, then it can be faster to type 'open -a ...' than to switch back to Finder. Using the 'open' command is almost always faster if you want to go to an application AND have it display a file that you're already working on in the Terminal, because you can combine bash history commands with the open command to quickly specify the file name. As a brief example, if you were editing a web page in vi and then decided to open that page in a non-default browser, you'd use these two commands:
vi Sites/dir1/dir2/page.html
open -a camino $!

The first command opens the file in the vi editor. After you've exited from the editor, the second command opens the same file in the Camino browser, using the '$!' bash history variable to avoid retyping the file name from the previous command. This is certainly faster than opening Camino through the GUI and navigating to the page, or even pasting the page URL into the browser location bar. (NB: Use history commands with caution if you don't know much about them. It's well worth taking the time to learn them if you use the command line a lot.)

For those of us who have experience with Unix, Linux or BSD, or who have started with Macs but have learned to love the Unix command line, the script submitted in this hint is a lovely piece of work! By the way, I also think Butler is very useful and cleverly built, and I use it myself. In general, the Mac GUI and the BSD (Unix) backend are a fantastic combination; both have their advantages.

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what about just using butler?
Authored by: Chevron on Jun 25, '04 07:36:25PM

thanks, I understand more now...



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