Learn to like not having to use your mouse. Only use your mouse as a last resort. One strength of CLI is almost never having to move your hands off of the homerow. Fuzzy finding is your friend.
For example:
- Instead of using a desktop app like GNOME, where you click on stuff to open them on a visual desktop -> Use a window manager like i3. In i3 configs, set a keyboard shortcut to fuzzy find your installed applications and open them. Now, your process for opening Firefox goes from clicking on a desktop icon or scrolling through menus, to pressing a keyboard shortcut and typing in the first few characters of Firefox and pressing enter. Desktops are bloat, you can get all of the functionality of a desktop with just the i3 rust status bar extension and CLI.
- Instead of typing out and remembering long CLI commands with a bunch of flags, use fzf to fuzzy find through your bash history. Fzf uses Ctrl-R for this, and it makes CLI interfaces much faster to navigate once you’ve already used those commands. It also makes searching files and navigating directories in CLI faster.
- Mac and Windows lack keyboard shortcuts to fully manage the layout of things on your screen. I know they have some shortcuts, but they can’t do everything without a mouse. Once again, I recommend a tiling window manager like i3 for moving tiles around, resizing, etc, all from the keyboard.
- Learn vim or similar text editors which not only use the keyboard for typing characters, but also for navigating and editing text. Instead of moving your mouse to the end character of a long word you want to delete and hitting the backspace key 20 times -> In vim, type ‘/’ and the first few characters of the word, press enter, and type ‘dw’ to delete the entire word. Vim mode is also available in bash and a bunch of extensions for other apps, you just have to configure them.
The linux motto to any problem is “it’s possible, but here are the pitfalls”. You can do almost everything on linux (unlike windows), but the tradeoff is it can sometimes require more time to learn and troubleshoot issues. In my opinion, linux is great for those of us who dislike to use the mouse and take our hands off the homerow. Get used to using the terminal to launch apps, instead of clicking stuff on the desktop. Learn keyboard shortcuts. My recommendation is to use a window manager like i3 with an i3 status bar at the bottom. This will give you a minimal desktop, where you can move windows/tiles around all with keyboard shortcuts. Open apps with something similar to dmenu, where you just have to press a keyboard shortcut and type the first few letters of the app you want to open, and press enter. Learn vim-like keyboard navigation to edit text and reposition the cursor through the text all without the keyboard. Linux integration with this style of experience is vastly superior to Windows and Mac.