> Learn just a tiny bit about pipes, wildcards, and utilities

Or I could use a desktop on expend my limited mental energy on things more relevant to me. It’s far easier for me to remember things in a visual or spatial manner.

These days I can say the same, I used to enjoy trying to minimize my mouse usage and fiddling with tiling window managers but now I just can't be bothered.

And the weird thing is that the type of mental effort required is not even a useful one per se, it's more like a strain (to me) than something that makes me sharper.

Still some things are easier in a GUI while others in a CLI, just depends on their nature and how often do you have to engage with them. But after a while navigating windows by Alt+Tab (Alt+`) or the mouse is fine really. I don't care to reach for Super+PgDown/PgUp when I can move my mouse to the corner of the screen and scroll to change the workspace.

That’s a good way of putting it. CLI skills are specialized skills that I’m not going to use for anything else, whereas using a desktop environment is re-using skills I already have for other purposes.

Even when I do write code, I spend more time thinking about the code than actually writing so losing time to using my mouse doesn’t matter.

Do you adjust audio settings in the terminal? I've been moving away from using my mouse but anything related to audio or display settings intimidates me.

If I want to start a program I can click its icon in the taskbar, if I want to see my files I can click the file manager in the taskbar, and since these actions are done with the mouse I can simultaneously lie back in bed while eating trifle with a long spoon.

You can't use Firefox in the terminal

You can't use it "in" the desktop either, you just start it from there. Same as with the terminal.

Mostly yeah. The DE does manage the browser's windows and notifications if you use those. The point is, you're going to use the mouse with Firefox, there's no advantage of using the terminal just to open it.

> The point is, you're going to use the mouse with Firefox

I was imprecise. I am solely talking about using a terminal emulator program on a display server, I wasn't talking about refraining from using anything outside a VTE. That would be pointless, yeah.

> there's no advantage of using the terminal just to open it.

My point is that it is. Typing 'firefox' is way simpler to open the program, than traversing an application list and selecting it. The latter can become faster once you have a shortcut, but then it's equivalent to 'f' or '!!' and the like. Language is more versatile, that's why we use it for fast communication. If you want the scissors from someone, you tell them, you don't make gestures or draw a picture, because that's way more work (unless you are mute).

I don't see what point you're trying to make. Those two examples work identically in the OSX terminal.

You gotta add firefox to your PATH first, but yeah, this isn't what the terminal is useful for.