I never use them but I can see the point. Like when you’re poking around for a log file, not sure what it’s called or where it’s stored and just going on a hunch…but you’re in an SSH session and don’t want to deal with X shenanigans.

It’s a legit PITA to ls, look for files, cat/tail them, etc. sometimes you just want to ls -alR but your corporate build runs tmux on SSH sessions with no configuration so you can’t scroll back since your shortcuts don’t work so you have to pipe everything to more and it just sucks.

They’re better than

cd something
ls
cd something-else
ls
cd ../..
ls

They are faster and more efficient for most basic file operations.

Sometimes it helps to have a visual aide for what you’re doing. CLI/TUI apps are often faster, or when accessing remotely, lower bandwidth.

Also, let people enjoy thing.

Eh… for home servers, when you want to take a quick glance at the files (maybe you are running a script that copies files around after some time…?). Then again, I don’t really find em useful when I have ls -al shoved inside my brain. It’s (kind of) “second nature” at this point.

Most systems I interface with are remote or headless. Forwarding X is annoying as fuck and to be avoided at all cost, so the more I can do though the terminal, the better.

PS: I’m also old enough to have been a regular user of Norton Commander, the application MC (Midnight Commander) is based on (inspired by).

EDIT: Norton Commander was a DOS app and so useful that it prompted Midnight Commander, one of the earliest applications developed for Linux. So MC kind of pre-dates Linux in a way.

Sometimes they are more convenient, than cd ls mv cp everything, when you don’t have access to a file explorer.

Specially if you are working with a server via ssh, or some machine without any Desktop Environment installed.

for example, when you need to copy some files and not the other, you can take your time selecting the specific files you need to copy instead of writing the list of files in one command. When you want to check the contents of a lot of files, you can just open file preview. Etc, basically sometimes CLI isn’t as convenient as TUI/GUI

It’s really annoying navigating a filesystem in the shell.

Either you remember exactly where a file is located, have a reference, or you’re going to be doing a lot of “ls, cd, ls, cd”.

deleted by creator

As a Linux newb, it’s easier than opening a SFTP session next to the terminal as I’m learning the file structure so it’s either that or cd then ls for every damn folder because I don’t know where I am or what’s in this folder vs that. Ranger has been nice for me as I learn.

People who can use them effectively tend to be a way faster with the regular admin work. Also, they can do some things which are not that simple on the command line (browse through tarball, browse through remote directories).

I have wondered this as well. I do find that sometimes I DO prefer to be able to see image thumbnails, but that’s about all I see.

There’s some good stuff out there, but zsh for me is plenty feature rich to do the job.

In the good old DOS days I used Norton Commander, when I need to look through the directory structure on a server it’s easier with Midnight Commander.

Well, for schoolwork, I mount my Google Drive storage onto my ~/googledrive directory (where I store all of my schoolwork) and usually use mc to navigate. Although, I am quite comfortable with the terminal. Its just that I have a lot of subfolders and going to a specific subfolder in mc is usually faster than doing “cd ~/googledrive/subfolder-with-long-path”.