Hi,

I'm just curious how often other game developers use the prompt in their game dev tasks.

Seldom do I use it, but when I do, it really is great for certain things like searching my computer system for specifications, for example, looking into the current status of drivers and so forth.

Does anybody here use prompt often and for what kinds of things?

I use command prompt every day at work for...

• Compiling code
• Invoking our content build system
• Running python scripts and batch files
• Starting up GUI tools for our engine
• Launching Maya with our custom script/plugin environment
• Compiling certain shaders that aren't part of the build pipeline
• Communicating with devkits (getting TTY, killing processes, reboot, power off)

I do work on Linux and most of my coding in vim, so er, a lot?

Edit: I guess I should play along and add some tasks. They're not much different from the others' though.

Source control! It's handy and easy with a few keystrokes. Just haven't met a visual interface that was as convenient (with some exceptions).

Builds. Anything that involves a lot of scripts, really. It could be bound to a button in a visual IDE, but then what about the times I need to run it once with a slightly tweaked configuration? Now I have to open the command editor to change the command and remember to change it back after I run it.

Various tools that don't have a graphical interface to begin with.

I spend most of my time with my hands on the keyboard. Most of the work doesn't involve a mouse and many of the tools don't for most of the time either (keyboard shortcuts, huzzah!). I find that it's a small mental break for most of my work flow any time I have to move a hand to the mouse. Now, if more of my work already involved the mouse my tune would probably be different--any time I'm working in Blender or GIMP I have one hand permanently attached to the mouse, but there it makes sense. Programming? Almost everything is keyboard shortcuts and typing. Mouse is... foreign. The terminal is just a natural extension at that point.

Coming from DOS, I love the command prompt. I use it everyday, a lot, mainly for:

• GIT.
• Scripting.
• Manual shader compilation.
• Testing.
• File system tasks(rename, move, search, etc.)

I use the Git Bash a lot, and I also use the console for debugging and testing programs. I also like prototyping stuff in the console, so that I can experiment with features before going to the trouble of making GUI elements for them.

I usually have a terminal of some sort open for git and for running build scripts.

I usually have one or two command prompts open on any computer I'm using.

Scripts

Remote server access

Doing some things that honestly could just as easily be done with a GUI these days, but having doing them by command line scares other people away so they bother me less. (I'm clearly doing something very technical and important, and not just cleaning up files from the desktop...)

Windows command prompt? Almost never, I'm only using it lately to run some commands to Oracle Database for some uni assignments.

Linux terminal? Always. Mostly for gsku'ing stuff, or just navigating around, searching for things ('locate' is awesome), changing file rights, etc.

I use Mercurial as SotL, but I have a handy Eclipse plugin that does most of the work for me (nevermind that I don't actually use any feature besides pull, commit and push).