I think a lot my nimbleness comes from avoiding the mouse...which can also be done fairly well in most GUIs.
In the case you mention, I'd reach for vimdiff. Maybe it's a career thing, but I've been shifted to enough different environments that I couldn't consistently learn and use the same GUI diff tool (commandline servers, Windows, macOS, Linuxes where I can only install new things to my homedir). It's also very nice to have your editor right there.
I work in VFX. Obviously all of the tools effectively require a GUI, but when dealing with large projects requiring a lot of files and servers I can't imagine only having a GUI.
Here are a bunch of use-cases that come to mind:
- We deal with a lot of image sequences; numbered files for each frame of video. Each piece of software has their own interface for "squishing" them down so you're looking at a list of file sequences instead of 1000s of individual files. Renumbering, renaming, or even sorting through them sucks in Windows Explorer, Finder, etc. A few simple commandline tools, many of which ship with any Linux terminal, make that easier. Although, I have found it much easier to use the GUI to pick out outliers (random frames that are 0-size, a grouping with a similar timestamp, random frames that are solid black). It's faster than building up a `ls -l | sort | grep | head`
- Remoting into servers. Just logging into 10 servers to see if a local file was installed or what Nvidia driver they're running. Remote desktop would be miserable or you'd need special tools. ssh in a for loop does this trivially--if you have more than a handful use GNU parallel or a flavor of ssh that does it concurrently.
- Most project files are ascii and there are a lot of situations where tweaking one or more of them saves a lot of time. For 1 file you can use a gui, if it's like 3 files you can use a macro in your IDE, 10-100 files you /can/ probably use an IDE but setting up a project and confirming it worked has more overhead than commandline tools.
- I still don't like any GUI file search tools in practice. I think it's because of the guardrails and optimizations? `find`, `grep`, and `locate` work way more predictably on system files, network paths, and USB drives, where GUI tools seem to have way more limitations.
But I'm the fist to admit I don't think it's the best way to work for everybody.
In the case you mention, I'd reach for vimdiff. Maybe it's a career thing, but I've been shifted to enough different environments that I couldn't consistently learn and use the same GUI diff tool (commandline servers, Windows, macOS, Linuxes where I can only install new things to my homedir). It's also very nice to have your editor right there.
I work in VFX. Obviously all of the tools effectively require a GUI, but when dealing with large projects requiring a lot of files and servers I can't imagine only having a GUI.
Here are a bunch of use-cases that come to mind: - We deal with a lot of image sequences; numbered files for each frame of video. Each piece of software has their own interface for "squishing" them down so you're looking at a list of file sequences instead of 1000s of individual files. Renumbering, renaming, or even sorting through them sucks in Windows Explorer, Finder, etc. A few simple commandline tools, many of which ship with any Linux terminal, make that easier. Although, I have found it much easier to use the GUI to pick out outliers (random frames that are 0-size, a grouping with a similar timestamp, random frames that are solid black). It's faster than building up a `ls -l | sort | grep | head` - Remoting into servers. Just logging into 10 servers to see if a local file was installed or what Nvidia driver they're running. Remote desktop would be miserable or you'd need special tools. ssh in a for loop does this trivially--if you have more than a handful use GNU parallel or a flavor of ssh that does it concurrently. - Most project files are ascii and there are a lot of situations where tweaking one or more of them saves a lot of time. For 1 file you can use a gui, if it's like 3 files you can use a macro in your IDE, 10-100 files you /can/ probably use an IDE but setting up a project and confirming it worked has more overhead than commandline tools. - I still don't like any GUI file search tools in practice. I think it's because of the guardrails and optimizations? `find`, `grep`, and `locate` work way more predictably on system files, network paths, and USB drives, where GUI tools seem to have way more limitations.
But I'm the fist to admit I don't think it's the best way to work for everybody.