When I started with HTML and CSS, I was using Dreamweaver. It was producing pretty clean code, so many people were recommending it. After some time and the Adobe acquisition, I moved away from visual editors to plain text editors. Now, while something like Visual Studio Code is preferable, I can basically use any text editor.

Something similar seems to have happened with the command line interface. Slowly, through some other programs like Launchy and Everything (alpha with dark mode), I got the idea that text is not only sufficient, but in many cases faster, better and more robust than GUI analogues.

I use Scoop for about 95% of my installs, winget for another few percent, and I would struggle to remember what I installed any other way, especially since creating your own Scoop bucket is pretty simple – here’s mine.

I check for Windows updates with a PowerShell module, I sync files with Robocopy and Rclone, I even install games from the Epic Store with Legendary, among other things.

Hey, I make this blog with Hugo and Git!

Is the CLI good for everything? Of course not! But it is pretty useful.

Cat in the image above, Shalquior from “Dark Souls II”, is by Zedotagger.