this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2025
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Having started out in programming before the GUI era, typing commands just feels good to me. But tbh Linux commands really are ridiculously cryptic - and needlessly so. In the 1980s and 90s there was a great OS called VMS whose commands and options were all English words (I don't know if it was localized). It was amazingly intuitive. For example, to print 3 copies of a file in landscape orientation the command would be PRINT /COPIES=3 /ORIENTATION=LANDSCAPE. And you could abbreviate anything any way you wanted as long as it was still unambiguous. So PRI /COP=3 /OR=LAND would work, and if you really hated typing you could probably get away with PR /C=3 /O=L. And it wasn't even case-sensitive, I'm just using uppercase for illustration.
The point is, there's no reason to make everybody remember some programmer's individual decision about how to abbreviate something - "chmod o+rwx" could have been "setmode /other=read,write,execute" or something equally easy for newbies. The original developers of Unix and its descendants just thought the way they thought. Terseness was partly just computer culture of that era. Since computers were small with tight resources, filenames on many systems were limited to 8 characters with 3-char extension. This was still true even for DOS. Variables in older languages were often single characters or a letter + digit. As late as 1991 I remember having to debug an ancient accounting program whose variables were all like A1, A2, B5... with no comments. It was a freaking nightmare.
Anyway, I'm just saying the crypticness is largely cultural and unnecessary. If there is some kind of CLI "skin" that lets you interact with Linux at the command line using normal words, I'd love to know about it.
This is far more manual than you probably had in mind, but Linux has support for a command called alias, which allows you to basically rename anything you like:
https://phoenixnap.com/kb/linux-alias-command
Alias lets you rename commands but not options. For example you could alias "grep" as "search", but you couldn't alias the "-h" option as "-nonames" and type "search -nonames" . You still have to type "search -h".
That's fair. But it's at least something.
That's because for the most part, it's faster. You don't have to lift one hand off the keyboard. Also using the cursor and clicking on something requires more precision and effort to get right compared to typing a word or 2 and hitting enter.
This is me kinda bragging, but at my typing speeds, something like
ls -lais under half a second. Typing cd proj (tab to auto complete) (first few letters of project name if it's fairly unique) (tab to auto complete), hitting enter, and then typing a quickdocker compose upis an order of magnitude faster than starting the containers in docker GUI.Agreed. Okay, to be fair, for parameters, most of the time you have the double-dash options which spell out what they do, and for advanced users there's the shorthands so everyone should be happy. But the program/command names themselves. Ugh. Why can't we standardize aliases for copy, move, remove/delete? Keep the old binaries names, but make it so that guides for new users could use actual English aliases so people would learn quicker?
At least part of this is the decentralized/complied nature of a FOSS operating system. You don't get a command called grep because someone making design decisions about a complete system holistically decides that tool should be called grep. You get it because some random programmer in the world needed a way to find patterns in text so they wrote one and that guy called it grep and someone else saw utility in packaging that tool with an OS. It's a patchwork, and things like this are a culture of sorts.
interesting you used grep because it's a command that has a very clear origin.
in ed/vi the g command was used to run commands on some pattern. eg
g/[regex pattern]/[command]the p command was used to print current line so to print any line that matched the string "grep" you would do:
g/grep/p.when this was made into a seperate command it was called grep:
g/re/p. using re to denote regex.The standard VMS text editor (EDT) assigned editing functions to the number keypad. Using it became so natural to me I eventually didn't think about pressing keys, it was like using a car gearshift. I've never gotten to that point with any GUI editor, even with heavy use of keyboard shortcuts.
It's definitely more intuitive but It would drive me insane having to type that all out.
Like I said, you could abbreviate any way you liked as long as it was unambiguous. I think the ease of remembering meaningful words overrides the bit of extra typing It drives me more insane - and takes more time - looking up one-letter options that have no relation to what they do.
The great thing about the core philosophy of unix is that you could easily do what you suggest and maintain compatibility with applications that rely on the traditional coreutils (Which is the major reason why no one will really suggest changing the traditional syntax. It'll break way too much.).
Just build a series of applications that actively translates your "less ambiguous" commands into traditional syntax. I've done it for a number of things where the syntax is long and hard to remember.
In fact I think a "nuutilus" would actually be fairly well received for distributions that are more new user focused and a pretty worthwhile endeavor.
I agree it's definitely possible but I wouldn't call it "easy" or describe it as "just build...". If it were that that simple it would exist already - and possibly it does. In my DCL days - Digital Command Language, which I just remembered was the actual name of the VMS shell language - I had an elaborate set of shortcuts in my .bashrc equivalent, whatever it was called. But I don't know bash anywhere near enough to take on creating a skin for it. Just making cheat sheets and gradually memorizing what I use most seems more realistic - and would be an easier process if the commands and options were more natural to begin with.
I say "easily" because it wouldn't require a major effort on the scale of coreutils. It could just be a series of fancy automation scripts. It'll take effort, but not the most intense of exercises.
I made a handful of them at an old job because we had a few specific tasks that we would regularly do, but not enough to commit it to memory. I just spent an afternoon here and there slapping together python scripts with just the options we would need and tossed it into /bin
aliasyour way to something you likeOh that reminds me of diskpart on Windows. I always liked the fact that I could abbreviate "assign" to "ass".
Sadly, Windows and "ass" are increasingly easy to associate.
That's true