With graphical interfaces, I am used to working with and around the existing software and don’t usually wish for much else but with Linux systems I have often stomped my feet at devs for seemingly being elitist intellectuals and not creating user friendly software for human beings. Today, I wanted to find a way to see .kra thumbnails in Nautilus file manager. I found two ways; a .deb package that I couldn’t install and a script. I did a little research and learned how to use terminal to run the script. I first used ls and cd commands to navigate to the folder the script was in then ls again to see the name of the script. I then used ./mmolch-thumbnailers.sh to run the script and although it ran, I still could not see the thumbnails so I tried again, this time adding sudo before ./ and it was absolutely successful. Now when I look in my Krita folders I can see thumbnails of my paintings. I will probably try to find a command line training site now to learn the ropes properly because I am beginning to warm up to Linux and see the potential of this method of doing things.
When I first installed Linux Mint 13 back in 2012, it was 2 solid weeks of serious swearing followed by 2 solid weeks of mild swearing, then 2 weeks of serious grumbling then 2 weeks of mild grumbling.
Then, the sun started to shine and flowers started growing as songbirds flew around me.
In most GUI File Managers, you should be able to right-click on a folder then select Open in Terminal
Did you need medication?
When I made it executable the right-click option to run in terminal appeared but clicking on it did nothing.
I always do.
I meant right-click on a folder to have the option to open a terminal with that folder as the current folder in the terminal. It’s easier than using cd to crawl around the file system.
I’m using the MATE desktop with the caja file manager. What do you use?
In fact, command line can be specified. They do overlap, but there are subtleties.
I use zsh for example (yes - of course - it’s the best) and you are certainly using bash.
Some easy things to remember to ease your cli journey:
- tab autocompletes unless you made a typo. You will find cd less painful with that. You can also check wildcards, aliases…
- arrow up goes back in history
All I know is that I am using a Debian VM (11 I think) on my Chromebook with Nautilus file manager.
Caja was forked from Nautilus a long time ago. I don’t know what Nautilus can and can’t do nowadays.
I just installed the nautilus-extension-gnome-terminal package which adds the option to my context menu.
I’m on a similar boat, and I often quickly forget commands I rarely use. If your terminal has addons or a built-in feature to save commands then I highly recommend using it.
Mine has a native one called “Quick Commands”, very basic but lets me save any commands I want under whatever name and group them. I add reminders in commented lines and done, I no longer need to worry about remembering an arcane command I use once in 5 months, just that some command for doing that thing exists.
I too have so many one liner stored. I now use dokuwiki it is nice small wiki really helps you with organising thoughts and small things like this
I use dolphin file manager in plasma. It lets me specify scripts to run and add them to right click context menu. So when I start a new project and I want some predetermined folder structure I right click and click this menu item called “init project” which makes necessary folder and sub folders for me.
You can check this feature called service menu for dolphin file manager.
P.S I love dolphin because it is so much powerful and provides many features out of the box like thumbnailing for kra and blend files
Meanwhile on KDE Plasma kra files simply have file previews without any additional work.
It’s still not perfectly covered but I’m pleased to see that nowadays I rarely have to use the command line anymore (compared to 10 years ago) unless I do programming or have to run obscure hardware no one else uses.
Two good shortcuts I can recommend for terminal
- ctrl + r: lets you do a search through your shell’s history
- arrow-up: go to previously used commands in order.
I don’t know whether it’s a KDE thing or something else, but for me it’s not only kra, blend that get previews in file browsers, the psds also get them. They accomplished something Adobe Photoshop on Windows removed since… version 7 I think? 
Thanks for the ctrl+r shortcut and dolphin tips, I didn’t know either.
I forgot to mention the terminal I’m using. It’s Konsole, it came with Quick Commands already installed but not enabled (menu > Plugins > Quick commands).
I’m also pretty sure you can open a terminal in split view in Nautilus and Dolphin. I don’t know if they use the same shortcut, its the F4 key for me. Then you can do all the navigation stuff in GUI and occasionally drop a command in the CLI if needed.
I’m glad I took a c++ class twenty or so years ago. that one introduction class gave me the notion of understanding programming/scripting languages. when I started on linux seven years ago, I didn’t have to swear as much when I needed to enter commands in CLI.
great idea on saving quick commands in the terminal. i have been using kate to write out all my commands, and now that file is convoluted. anyone know if I could import/export those quick commands though?
The file containing the commands can be found at ~/.config/konsolequickcommandsconfig and the structure is pretty simple. 
THIS IS AMAZING!!!
In case you guys haven’t noticed from the all caps, I’m pretty stoked about this 
oh gosh, learning CLI is ROUGH.
I learnt most of it from my dad as he was a techie for long before I was even born. I was maybe like, 7 years old, when I’d sit on gcompris and he’d teach me how to use MC. Wild times! Can’t imagine functioning any other way today; seeing some of my peers struggle on even some basic Windows management has been a big eye opener in realizing that dad really gave me a good headstart.
I’m horrid at programming still, but still love arch to death. You can pry my old arch laptop from my cold dead hands.
Back on topic: I somehow never thought of storing oneliners locally. I’d just use wikis and forums to navigate, but honestly keeping a small db of commands sounds like a great idea; I might just start using SiYuan for this, especially since I already wanted to try some self-hosted alternative to Notion [the monthly fees for multiple users are just totally out of my budget’s reach, lmao].
This thread is interesting. I recently installed Linux myself, and i have been slowly learning to use the dreaded terminal for some things here and there. I stumbled here because i am looking to automate a process which i currently do manually.
I oftentimes take photographs with my phone. Those come in .jpg format, who’s image compression is not the best anymore. Additionally, because my phone camera is a scam (or at least i think so, because it is advertised as 108MP, but its results look as if someone took a picture and up-scaled it 10 times with something like bi-cubic interpolation) it has a much higher resolution, which is unnecessary given the actual details it captures, and this annoys the hell out of me.
So, what i end up doing is, i import each of my photographs into Krita, downscale them to 1/4th (usually, but i could do 1/2 too - im not sure if i wanna do something in-between, like 1/3, but so far i choose to avoid it) with some filter that produces nice and sharp results when downscaling, and i export them as .jxl lossy, with 85% quality.
All this makes my photographs’ file sizes drop from 3 and 4 MB to just above 100 KB, which i droll over really like! This does have its negatives, the two i am encountering is the lack of support (most every-day software doesn’t support .jxl) and the thing with metadata, which get lost in the conversion. I have experimented with ways to re-write metadata afterwards, but for the most part i don’t know what i am doing. (I also can’t get that metadata to actually show up, even in many programs that can handle .jxl.)
It would be so nice if i could automate this process, but i have recently found out that Krita, aside from some very basic commands does not have a proper command line interface! There are also no man-pages or info-pages for it, it seems. And i don’t know how to work around that! I don’t want to write python scripts because this pipeline requires other programs too (ExifTool in particular) plus im not familiar with python.
Im sad… :C
I recently happened across this website with some nice guides and tutorials about learning how to use the Linux command line, it also has a very in-depth downloadable .pdf book. It starts off with the basics like cd and ls and then goes into deeper things like I/O redirection and writing shell scripts.
Even though I’m already somewhat familiar with using the terminal, there’s a lot that can be learned and it’s handy to have a reference guide at hand. The command line is quite powerful, after all, since it predates having GUI.
There’s also alternate shells you can install (and use in your terminal of choice) like fish (friendly interactive shell). fish has useful features like syntax highlighting for (in)valid commands and autosuggestions for commands, paths, and command history.
(The link you shared doesn’t seem to work on my end. Can you verify it works on yours?)
Also there is The Linux Documentation Project (or TLDP) which has a lot of material, though a lot of it is old! :3