What are some common terminal aka CLI workflows?

I don't think I would seek out a terminal UI without context. Like you say, in a mobile environment for instance it doesn't make any sense at all. I do have a terminal emulator on my phone, but I use it to phone into my network and reboot something occasionally.

Where TUIs make sense is a) if you're already working out of a terminal i.e. you're a developer or b) your workflow is already very keyboard-centric and using something that is designed with a keyboard input only makes sense. Occasionally there is another scenario c) where the TUI is actually the best format for interacting with a medium. For example, before the reddit API fiasco, the non-affiliated TUI client was a lot better than even the original web interface because there were no ads and you didn't have any of the non-textual fluff to distract you.

CLIs have pros and cons. The biggest con IMO is their lack of discovery. Once you forget an obscure ffmpeg flag, it's gone, and it's hard to remember without digging through the manpage again, and no one likes that. The excellence of GUIs is that they can have those semi-obscure features which you can discover easily.

So for a CLI program, you would want it to be something that a) either you interact with every day, so you won't have the chance to forget or b) something you never have to interact with (e.g a piece of an pipeline or script) directly.

Advantages for CLI include novelty (there often is only CLI programs for obscure tasks, because they're easy to make), ease to fit into data pipelines/automation, and sometimes power (again, since it's easy to make, so they can be more cutting edge/expose more powerful features with burdening developers with UI work).

As an example of the former, git. Unfortunately, I do have to use git every day, so I do remember all the things I need to do with it. As an example of the later, youtube-dlp, which I never call directly, but have some scripts which use it.

I write software developer for a living, and I think it's really important for software developers to be comfortable with the command line as a tool. I even use a TUI based editor as my primary IDE (Helix). Getting familiar with this stuff (and finding the right tools that make command line work more enjoyable) is a great tool to have in your toolbelt.

In my experience the main use cases for the command line are:

• You can easily run lots of one-off commands/applications from a single, relatively universal interface. I have a shortcut that brings up a terminal, and it immediately gives me direct access to a lot of tools that I use daily. For example, if I want to play around with some HTTP API, I can use HTTPie to fire off a quick request — I press F12, type http httpbin.org/get, and I immediately see what's going on. That's a lot quicker than opening up Postman (or whatever the latest equivalent is), waiting for it to load, clicking around to fill in the fields, etc. For a lot of simple tasks like "run the script that automatically checks my code works" or "update my timesheet so I know what I worked on today", doing this in the command line is the easiest approach.
• Your commands become easily repeatable and scriptable. Every time I run a command, it's saved in my shell history, which means later I can go back and run that exact same command again. If I want to share a particular command with my colleagues, I can copy the command as a string and send it to them, and they can do the exact same thing that I did. That's not as easy with a GUI app, where you need to tell them "click button X, then button Y, then scroll to section Z".
• You can combine data from different sources very easily. Being able to pull data from a source, then pull out only the interesting bits of that data with a tool like jq makes a lot of data analysis questions surprisingly easy. Combining that with a tool like xargs to run another command that uses that data means that I do some really quite powerful things.

That said, I'm also quite sceptical of the value of the command line outside of these bounds. Like I said, I use a TUI text editor as one of my main tools at work, but this is very much despite it being a TUI, rather than because of it. The terminal isn't great at drawing complex UIs — you don't have a lot of room for detail, and subtle designer tricks like changing font size to guide your eyes properly often just aren't possible. Moreover, you've often got several layers interacting at once to make something work — your OS, your terminal emulator, potentially a multiplexer, and then your TUI application itself — which means that keystrokes and shortcuts are often more complicated to manage. In general, if I'm going to be working with a single tool for longer than about a minute, I'd rather it being a proper GUI than a terminal tool.

If your main text editor is vim or emacs then I'd say you're practically living in the terminal already. I'm pretty much in "mouse-optional" mode unless I have to use a GUI for the task. I find it just outright faster and more consistent copy/pasting a single line of text instead of following screenshots to click things.

Before I found Todoist I managed a to-do list on a command line. Was nice and simple, but Todoist's features like parsing dates and times is just too convenient to pass up.

And if you code regardless of hobby or work, source code management is practically a CLI workflow with endless attempts to put a GUI on top of it. With GitHub, you can monitor workflow runs and review/approve pull requests completely from the CLI.

Another is mass renaming files and moving around my home directory in general. I have full PDF copies of payslips, receipts and heaps of travel photos that get downloaded with nonsensical filenames, this helps keep everything nice and tidy. Then setup recurring encrypted backups for all of these with rsync and borg.

Working with that many small files around necessitated learning to move more efficiently around the filesystem with commands like pushd, popd and cd -. They're a big level up in how it sped up my workflow in return for just a few minutes of effort reading how to use those commands beyond the standard cd.

My more occasional CLI uses:

• transcoding batches of video by piping youtube-dl to ffmpeg
• compiling that one program a hobbyist put the source code on Github that solves my exact problem at that particular time
• curl and jq for talking in API. If you have a Slack webhook for example, you can get notifications from whatever thing you want that can reach that webhook. Transcoding a big batch of video, your daily backup jobs, you name it.
• using ansible to get a repeatable install of my Linux machines or as close I can get to. Those little tweaks you do to your computer over time from random searches to fix some specific thing? Yeah put that in a playbook as well. Back when Windows still needed them I had a folder full of registry tweaks to apply on a fresh install which provided the same thing.

I'm very keyboard centric and a heavy terminal user. Been like this for years since I started using Linux in 1999/2000 with Slackware and Mandrake.

I love terminal and TUI apps, but there are downsides. When you get used to a TUI APP, it's really hard to use another one. It's very specific in how it works, how you navigate inside, shortcuts, etc. You end up with a lot of specific muscle memory that's applicable to one software only.

I use helix as my main editor and cmus as a music player and fortunately both have vim centric navigation so I easily navigate both and my window manager without even thinking, but if cmus dies I will have a hard time adjusting to another.

I'm slowly moving away from this and using KDE Plasma + GUI software because discoverability is way easier in a GUI app.

I think that when TUI starts to get rather complex, it's not really that good.

You start being tied to your specific configs and dotfiles and dread losing it. Now you have a git repo just to configure your computer.

That said, I recommend cmus as a music player. Fast, easy and it is around since the dawn of times and still being developed.

Spotifyd + spt for Spotify.

Other than for developing software (also using the Helix editor), my main use for terminal workflows is personal knowledge management.

• Taskwarrior manages my ToDo list. I have setup various shortcuts and little scripts to slice and dice my current task list by project, priority or context. It's a very flexible tool, and I like to call it from my shell startup file so I see the most urgent tasks every time I open a new terminal window.

• zk makes for a nice personal wiki. Here, too, I have a few scripts that help me manage things. There's one that creates a daily journal note and links it to the notes from the previous day/week/month/year (though I haven't been using it for a year yet...) so I can hold myself accountable for what I did or did not get done in that timespan.

  I'm also experimenting with storing some of my bookmarks as notes inside zk: a small script uses Jina Reader to turn a given webpage into markdown, so that I can both annotate and full-text search it if the need arises.

• One interesting thing I've started using a short while ago is Recutils. It's a plaintext format for small-to-medium databases that can be queried from the command-line. It is much easier to work with than CSV files, because each column entry goes on its own line so there's mostly no need to escape special characters.

I'm a software engineer in the data space which means spending a significant portion of time digging into raw file formats such as CSV, JSON, etc. Visidata has been a blessing.

VisiData is an interactive multitool for tabular data. It combines the clarity of a spreadsheet, the efficiency of the terminal, and the power of Python, into a lightweight utility which can handle millions of rows with ease.

Visidata

Also, less of a CLI tool, but I've been using DuckdDB a lot lately to dig into different file formats as it's easy to read differing formats into tables, compare files, then write to a third file or modify an existing one. All easily accomplished in a few lines.

DuckDB

I feel like CLIs and TUIs need to be talked about more separately. I use cli tools a lot and they are extremely good for complex tasks, but I don't use many TUI tools and would never explicitly seek out a tool because of it being a TUI. It seems like there has been a resurgence of TUI apps and like you I am curious as to what the appeal is.