Command-line applications are back – even though they never really went away – but the trends of recent years, moving away from any form of automation towards the use of coding agents, have brought them back into the spotlight. We’ll be taking you through the whole journey from the very beginning. We’ll find out why (\r)\n, how to move the cursor in all directions within the terminal, how to communicate via sockets, how to build a command-line application and an application with a terminal user interface, how to create man pages, how to make documentation available in the browser, and even how to record a video for YouTube. All using Java as a native binary and a few open-source tools.