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João has been covering the tech world for over 7 years, with a heavy focus on laptops and the Windows ecosystem. I also love all things tech and videogames, especially Nintendo, which he’s always happy to talk about.

Prior to joining XDA in 2021, he worked at Neowin: https://www.neowin.net/news/poster/jo%C3%A3o-carrasqueira/

For all the cool things you can do on a modern computer, with powerful processors and GPUs, sometimes, going back to basics is for the best. The terminal is a powerful tool that’s preferred by a lot of people, and while it’s most popular on Linux, the Windows Terminal can do a lot, too. You just have to find the right tools.

For a little experiment, I decided to try and switch as much of my workflow as possible to the command line on Windows. You might be thinking it’s impossible to switch a modern workflow to a terminal window, and you’d be right. But it’s also much more possible than you might think, depending on what it is that you want to do. Let’s take a look.

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Writing

It’s possible, and it’s not all that bad

Let’s start with an easy one, which is writing text. That’s a bit of a softball, but it’s also the main part of my job, so it’s pretty important part of my workflow. Thankfully, because it’s a softball, I didn’t have any issues with this. Unfortunately, writing directly in XDA’s content management system was out of the question, but I can just as easily write in plain text and then copy that into the CMS using a web browser. I can even use the HTML formatting tags so that it looks properly formatted when I copy it over, as you see in the image above.

This is made possible by Edit, the terminal-based text editor Microsoft recently added to Windows 11. All I need to do is type "edit" into a terminal window and a new file is created for me to edit. I can also open existing files, of course. All the text you’ve read so far was written in Edit, and it works as well as I could have hoped it would.

It may seem silly to consider this a "replacement" for my usual workflow, but between internet outages in my home or our own platform being down, I’ve definitely had to write text in Notepad before. This terminal-based tool is just as good for that, if not better, since it’s so simple and to the point. It even supports word wrap, so I can actually see everything I’ve written without having to scroll back and forth. Of course, some things like adding images and special article elements can’t be done this way easily, though I suppose in theory, I could write out the HTML code for some of these things.

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Browsing the web

Wait, what?

Everyone knows Google Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Opera, and so on, but if you want to stick to a terminal window, how can you browse the web? Well, meet Links, a text-based web browser that runs right in your terminal. There have actually been a couple of terminal-based browsers out there, such as Lynx and w3m, but Links is the only one I could really get to work on Windows, and if you’re wondering how it works... well, it almost does.

As I’ve mentioned, accessing XDA’s CMS was impossible with this browser, because right off the bat, the login page wouldn’t load. However, I could visit the XDA homepage and read some articles. The layout is definitely not something you’d consider user-friendly, but it is readable, and it works. Reddit also managed to load and show some content, though I couldn’t sign in and the structure was definitely a little too confusing to be ideal. Surprisingly enough, the classic Reddit design didn’t seem to help much, either.

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Something that worked quite well was Wikipedia, where the homepage even had a functioning search bar. I was able to search and directly navigate to the page about the Links web browser, which you can see above.

Browsing a lot of modern sites will definitely be a big challenge, but this isn’t as bad as I thought it might be. Links even has a tab for downloads, so you can download files this way, if the website you’re visiting lets you get that far. I managed to download Links from its official website using Links itself, so that’s something. Links does come with a graphical mode as well and it might make some pages more presentable, though I found that it still won’t fix non-functional pages like the Reddit login.

Image credit: Twibright Labs

Links

Installing apps

Winget is a blessing

One part of the terminal that we’ve talked about quite a lot is winget, and it’s worth bringing back up here. I didn’t need to install a lot of apps this time, but even outside of this experiment, winget is my favorite way to install apps on Windows, and it all works directly in the terminal.

It’s very easy to use, too. All you need to do is type in winget search followed by the name of the app you want, and all the matching results will appear. You can then use winget install command followed by specific name of the package you want to install, and you’re off to the races.

Winget can even create and restore lists of apps so you can set up all your apps in one go as soon as you start using your PC. It’s an amazing tool that comes highly recommended whether you’re trying to switch to the terminal for everything or not.

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Editing images and more

There’s a lot you can do

There’s quite a lot more you can do with terminal that you might not immediately think of, either. Thanks to my colleague Beatrice Manuel, I also learned about ImageMagick, an image editor that works entirely from the terminal and actually has a lot of features. It’s not going to replace Photoshop, of course, but it can do things like resize a photo, add watermarks, and a lot of more basic tasks that can make it easier to upload images to certain websites.

As an example, the image above shows an image I resized using ImageMagick, which is one of the more basic commands you can use.

But there’s a lot more you can do with file management using the terminal, too. Of course, you can browse files and folders using the cd command, but you can also create folders and move files around. The mkdir command will create a new folder, and the move command can then move files from one location into another. Here’s how I moved all my executable files into a dedicated folder inside my general Downloads directory.

Not only that, but Windows 11 can even zip and unzip files directly in the terminal, too. Simply use the tar command followed by whatever action you want to take. For example, I compressed all the executable files above into a single folder using this command:

tar -cf 'executables' *.*

And what’s more, to get help with doing the above, I used Links to search the web. It’s really impressive how much you can do with just the terminal.

I wouldn’t want to live like this, but...

Of course, I’m not here to make an argument that it’s viable or ideal to go back to just using the terminal for your entire workload. There are obviously going to be some hurdles, and modern computing is just too reliant on fancy interfaces that make things easier. But this experiment did show that there are a lot more possibilities than I thought with using the Terminal. If you have some free time, I think experimenting with this is actually kind of fun and an interesting learning experience.