https://www.howtogeek.com/437682/command-lines-why-do-people-still-bother-with-them/
The command line is almost 50 years old, but it's not outdated. Text-based terminals are still the best way to accomplish many tasks, even in the age of graphical desktops and touch-screen gadgets.
In fact, the command line is becoming more respected than ever with Microsoft creating a powerful new Windows Terminal application. Windows 10's PowerShell environment is surprisingly powerful, but Microsoft still went out of its way to add support for basically the full Linux command-line environment to Windows 10.
At one time if you wanted to interact with a computer, you typed. That was it. There was nothing else. That might sound restrictive and archaic, but as a step-up from having to use punched cards or perforated paper tapes, typing was radical and transformative. And migrating from teletypewriters with their rolls of paper to terminals with cathode ray tube (CRT) screens was another ground shift in human and computer interactions.
That step paved the way for the interactive shell to really come into its own. Now you could send instructions to the computer and very quickly have responses displayed on your screen. No more clack-clack-clack as you waited for your paper printout to clatter its way out of your teletypewriter.
Fair enough, but that was then, this is now. Computing is a whole different ball game. Apart from the obvious locked-in cases like using a computer that doesn't have a graphical desktop environment installed, or using a remote computer via SSH over a low bandwidth connection, or controlling a headless or embedded system, why use the command line over a graphical desktop?
Terms like command line, terminal window, and shell are used almost interchangeably by some people. That's incorrect jargon. They are all quite different. They're related, but they're not the same thing.
A terminal window is a window in a graphical desktop environment that runs an emulation of a teletype terminal.
The shell is the program that runs inside the terminal window. It takes your input and, depending on what you typed, tries to interpret and execute the instructions itself, pass them to some of the other utilities that make up the operating system, or find a script or program that matches what you have typed.
The command line is where you type. It is the prompt that the shell presents when it is waiting for you to enter some instructions. The term "command line" is also used to refer to the actual content of what you typed. For example, if you talk to some other computer user about a difficulty you had trying to get a program to run, they may ask you, "What command line did you use?" They're not asking what shell you were using; they want to know what command you typed.
Altogether, these combine to form the command line interface (CLI).
The CLI can seem retrograde and confusing to those who are not familiar with it. Surely there's no place in a modern operating system for such a dated and geeky way of using a computer? Didn't we give all that up decades ago when windows, icons, and mice appeared and graphical desktop environments with graphical user interfaces (GUIs) became available?
Yes, the GUI has been around for decades. The first version of Microsoft Windows was released way back in 1985 and became the PC desktop norm with the release of Windows 3.0 in 1990.
The X Window System, used in Unix and Linux, was introduced in 1984. This brought graphical desktop environments to Unix and its many derivatives, clones, and off-shoots.
But the release of Unix pre-dates these events by a more than a decade. And because there was no other option, everything had to be possible via the command line. All human interaction, all configuration, every use of the computer had to be able to be performed via the humble keyboard.