Hey everyone, and welcome back to My Weird Prompts. I am Corn, and I am sitting here in our house in Jerusalem with my brother.
Herman Poppleberry, at your service. And we are diving into a topic today that is very near and dear to our housemate Daniel.
Yeah, Daniel sent us that audio prompt earlier, and you can tell he has been spending a lot of time in the terminal lately. He mentioned being a big fan of something he called Claude Code and this whole idea of a command line resurgence.
It is a fascinating angle. I think Daniel might be seeing some of the experimental wrappers people are building around these large language models and getting a bit ahead of the official release cycles, but the core of what he is talking about is very real. There is this massive interest right now in how we interact with computers when we strip away the windows, the icons, and the mouse pointers.
It is funny because to most people, the command line looks like something out of a nineteen eighties movie where a hacker is trying to break into a mainframe. It is just green text on a black background. But Daniel called it Teletext for the modern era.
I love that analogy. Teletext was so efficient, right? No distractions, just the information you needed. And for those of us who spend our lives in code, the command line interface, or C-L-I, is not just a nostalgic trip. It is a power tool.
Well, let us start with the history, because Daniel asked how much these predate graphical user interfaces. I mean, obviously they came first, but how far back are we talking?
We are talking about the very dawn of interactive computing. In the nineteen fifties and early sixties, you did not really have an interface at all. You had punch cards. You would hand a stack of cards to an operator, and they would run them through a room-sized machine.
Right, so there was no real-time feedback. You just waited for the printout.
Exactly. The first real step toward what we recognize as a command line came with the development of time-sharing systems in the mid-sixties. Project M-A-C at M-I-T and the development of the Multics operating system were huge. This was when they started using teletype machines, basically electric typewriters that could talk to the computer.
So instead of cards, you were typing lines of text and getting lines of text back.
Precisely. And that is where the term T-T-Y comes from, which you still see in Linux today. It stands for Teletypewriter. The shell, which is the program that actually interprets your commands, started to take shape here. Louis Pouzin, a French computer scientist, actually coined the term shell around nineteen sixty-four to describe a program that could call other programs.
That is such a simple but powerful metaphor. The shell is the outer layer that protects the core of the operating system, the kernel, while letting the user interact with it.
It is beautiful. And then in the early nineteen seventies, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs created Unix. This is the big bang moment for the command line. They created the Thompson shell, which was later replaced by the Bourne shell in nineteen seventy-nine. That is the direct ancestor of the Bash shell that most people use today.
So we are talking about a sixty-year-old lineage. That is incredible longevity for a technology. But Daniel mentioned that as a Linux user, he used to find the syntax frustrating. The minus signs, the parameters, the case sensitivity. Why did we settle on such a difficult way to talk to machines?
Well, it is only difficult if you think of it as a conversation. If you think of it as a language for composing tools, it is brilliant. There is this concept called the Unix Philosophy. It says that each program should do one thing and do it well. And to make them work together, you use what is called a pipe.
I remember you explaining pipes to me before. It is that vertical bar character on the keyboard, right?
Yes. It allows you to take the output of one program and feed it directly as the input to another. So, if I want to find a specific word in a massive file, I do not open a text editor and hit find. I use a tool called cat to read the file, pipe it into a tool called grep to find the word, and maybe pipe that into a tool called sort to organize the results.
So it is like Lego bricks. You are building a custom solution on the fly.
Exactly. And that is why developers love it. In a graphical user interface, or G-U-I, you are limited by what the developer put in the menus. If there is no button for what you want to do, you are stuck. In a C-L-I, you are the architect.
But let us talk about the state of this in twenty twenty-six. Daniel mentioned that even state-of-the-art AI tools are leaning into the terminal. Why is that? If we have these incredibly advanced AI models that can understand natural language, why are we putting them in a text box from nineteen seventy?
It sounds counterintuitive, but it is about the environment where the work happens. If you are a developer, your terminal is your cockpit. You have your code editor, your version control, and your deployment tools all right there. Switching to a web browser to ask an AI a question is a context switch. It breaks your flow.
That makes sense. It is about minimizing friction.
It really is. And there is a second-order effect here. When an AI lives in your terminal, it can see what you are doing. It can see the error message your compiler just spat out. It can see the structure of your file system. It can actually execute commands for you. That is why we are seeing this surge in what people are calling AI agents for the shell.
You know, I have noticed a lot of people talking about T-U-Is lately as well. Terminal User Interfaces. How do those differ from a standard command line interface?
That is a great distinction. A C-L-I is strictly line-by-line. You type a command, you get a response. A T-U-I uses the entire terminal window to create a layout. Think of things like htop for monitoring your system or lazygit for managing your code. They use blocks of color and borders made of text characters to create something that looks a bit like a graphical app, but it still runs entirely in text mode.
Like those old B-B-S systems from the nineties.
Exactly. And the reason they are making a comeback is because they are incredibly fast. You do not have to wait for a heavy graphical library to load. They are also very stable. If you are logging into a server halfway across the world over a slow connection, a G-U-I might lag or crash. A T-U-I will usually work perfectly.
Daniel mentioned a tool called Yazi in his notes to us, a file manager written in Rust. I looked it up, and it seems like it is part of this new wave of high-performance terminal tools.
Yazi is a great example. It is niche, but it is part of a broader trend where developers are using modern languages like Rust or Go to rewrite classic terminal tools. Because these languages are so fast and memory-efficient, they can do things with text that were impossible before. We are seeing terminal file managers that can render image previews and handle thousands of files without breaking a sweat.
It is interesting that we are using these high-performance languages to build tools for an interface that seems so primitive.
But is it primitive? That is the question. Think about the resolution of a command. If I want to rename a thousand files in a G-U-I, I have to click a lot, or maybe find a specific batch-rename tool. In a terminal, I can do it with a single line of code using a regular expression. The command line is actually a higher-resolution interface for the mind.
That is a bold statement, Herman. A higher-resolution interface for the mind? Explain that.
When you use a G-U-I, you are navigating someone else's mental model of how a task should be done. You are looking for their buttons and their icons. When you use a terminal, you are expressing your intent directly through language. Language is the most flexible and powerful tool humans have ever developed. By using a C-L-I, you are mapping your thoughts directly to actions.
I see what you mean. It is the difference between pointing at a picture of a sandwich and actually saying, I would like a sourdough bread with extra pickles and no mayo.
Exactly. The specificity is the superpower.
So, what about the hardware side of this? Or at least the software that emulates the hardware. We are not using teletypes anymore. We are using terminal emulators. I have heard you talking about things like Warp and Ghostty lately.
Oh, the world of terminal emulators is exploding right now. For decades, we just used basic terminals like xterm or the default ones that came with our operating systems. But now, we have these modern emulators that are G-P-U accelerated.
Wait, why do you need a graphics card to render text?
It sounds ridiculous, right? But modern terminals are doing a lot. They are handling millions of colors, they are rendering complex fonts with ligatures, and they are providing smooth scrolling at one hundred and twenty frames per second. Ghostty, for example, is a project that has been getting a lot of buzz for being incredibly fast and using the G-P-U to make the text feel as responsive as a video game.
And then there is Warp, which is trying to turn the terminal into a collaborative tool.
Yeah, Warp is interesting because it treats the terminal more like a modern text editor. It gives you a cursor you can move with a mouse, it has built-in AI search, and you can share your command history with your team. Some purists hate it because it breaks the traditional model, but it is clearly bringing a lot of new people into the command line world.
It feels like there is a bit of a tension there. Between the old-school philosophy of simple, text-only tools and this new world of G-P-U acceleration and AI integration.
There is. But I think they are actually feeding each other. The old-school tools give us the foundation of stability and composability. The new tools give us the performance and the ease of use to keep those foundations relevant in twenty twenty-six.
Let us address one of the things Daniel brought up about CLIs being better for development because they eliminate the complications of a graphical layer. He called it the distraction-free environment. Is that really a significant factor, or is it just a feeling?
No, it is a very real technical factor. When you build a G-U-I application, a huge percentage of your code is just dedicated to drawing the interface. You have to worry about window scaling, high-D-P-I displays, different operating system themes, and accessibility layers. It is a massive amount of complexity that has nothing to do with the actual logic of your program.
So by skipping the G-U-I, you are skipping all those potential bugs.
Exactly. A C-L-I tool is much easier to test and much easier to maintain. It is also much easier to automate. You cannot easily tell a G-U-I app to run itself every night at three in the morning and send you a report. But with a C-L-I, that is just a simple cron job.
It is about reliability.
It is. And for the user, that distraction-free element Daniel mentioned is huge. When you are in the terminal, there are no notifications, no pop-ups, no animations. It is just you and the data. It forces a kind of focus that is very hard to find in modern software.
It is like writing on a typewriter instead of a laptop.
Very much so. There is a reason why many of the best writers still use very simple text editors or even terminal-based editors like Vim or Neovim. It removes the temptation to fiddle with fonts and margins and lets you focus on the words.
You mentioned Neovim. We should probably talk about the Language Server Protocol, or L-S-P, because that feels like a major turning point for terminal-based work.
Oh, absolutely. This is a bit technical, but it is one of the most important developments in the last decade of computing. Historically, if you wanted your text editor to understand a language like Python or Rust, the editor had to have that logic built in. This meant that every editor had to reinvent the wheel for every language.
That sounds like a lot of wasted effort.
It was. So Microsoft, of all companies, developed the Language Server Protocol. It basically says, let us separate the editor from the language logic. The language logic lives in a server, and the editor just talks to it over a standard protocol.
So any editor can talk to any language server?
Yes. And this was a massive win for the terminal. Suddenly, a simple, lightweight terminal editor like Neovim could have the same powerful features as a massive, heavy I-D-E like Visual Studio. Things like auto-completion, jump-to-definition, and real-time error checking. It leveled the playing field.
So you get the power of a modern development environment with the speed and focus of a terminal.
Precisely. It is the best of both worlds.
Let us move to some practical takeaways for our listeners. If someone is listening to this and they have always been intimidated by that blinking cursor in the black box, where should they start? Is it worth the learning curve in twenty twenty-six?
I would say it is more worth it now than ever. Not because you have to use it for everything, but because it gives you a deeper understanding of how your computer actually works. My first piece of advice is: do not try to learn it all at once. You do not need to memorize a hundred commands.
What are the big ones? The essential kit?
Start with navigation. Learn how to move between folders with c-d, how to list files with l-s, and how to move or copy files with m-v and c-p. Once you can move around comfortably, learn how to use a basic text editor like Nano or Micro.
Micro is a good recommendation. It feels a lot more like a modern editor with mouse support and familiar keyboard shortcuts.
It is a great bridge. And then, the real magic happens when you learn about the package manager for your system. Whether it is Homebrew on Mac, or apt on Linux, or Winget on Windows. Being able to install software by just typing a single command is a revelation for most people.
It definitely beats hunting through websites for download buttons and running installers.
And if you are feeling adventurous, try a T-U-I. Install something like btop to see your system performance. It is beautiful, it is informative, and it will make you feel like you are actually in control of the machine.
I think one of the most interesting things Daniel mentioned was the nostalgia. He talked about growing up in the nineties. Do you think our generation has a specific attachment to this aesthetic?
I think so. We saw the transition. We remember when computers felt a bit more raw and experimental. There is a certain honesty to a terminal. It is not trying to sell you anything. It is not trying to keep you engaged with an algorithm. It is just a tool, waiting for your input.
There is a beauty in that simplicity.
There really is. And I think that is why we are seeing this interest from younger developers too. They have grown up in a world of highly polished, very restrictive apps. To them, the terminal feels like a secret world where they can actually see the gears turning. It is empowering.
You know, it occurs to me that as AI becomes more prevalent, the command line might actually become the primary way we interact with these models. If an AI can understand a complex instruction, it is much easier for it to translate that into a series of terminal commands than to try and navigate a G-U-I.
That is exactly where we are heading. We are moving toward a world of natural language interfaces that use the command line as their execution layer. You tell the AI what you want, and it writes the shell script to make it happen. The terminal becomes the universal language between humans, AI, and the operating system.
So in a weird way, the oldest interface is becoming the most future-proof.
It is the ultimate survivor. It has outlasted floppy disks, C-D-ROMs, and it might even outlast the mouse.
That is a wild thought. Imagine a world where we go back to just talking to our computers in text, but the computer is finally smart enough to understand us.
It would be a full-circle moment. From the teletype to the AI agent.
Well, Herman, this has been a great dive. I think we have covered the history, the philosophy, and the modern state of the CLI. Do you have any final thoughts for Daniel and our listeners?
Just that the terminal is not a wall; it is a door. It might look intimidating from the outside, but once you step through, you realize you have much more power over your digital life than you ever thought possible. Do not be afraid of the blinking cursor. It is just waiting for you to tell it what to do.
Well said. And hey, if you are enjoying the show and our deep dives into these weird prompts Daniel sends us, we would really appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favorite podcast app or on Spotify. It genuinely helps other curious minds find us.
Yeah, it makes a huge difference. We love seeing this community grow.
You can find us, as always, on Spotify and at our website, myweirdprompts.com. We have the full archive there, plus a contact form if you want to send us your own weird prompts.
We are always looking for new rabbit holes to explore.
This has been episode two hundred and thirty-one of My Weird Prompts. Thanks for listening, and we will talk to you next week.
Until next time, keep exploring.
