Nice avatar choice. I used to know someone who worked there ... both of us could see the writing on the wall when they reported that the office furniture was going back to the rental company.
How do you cause the OSX GUI to quit and just use a cli? Everything seems too tied to it that doing so would seem not to make for a stable system. I suppose you could enlarge a terminal window to a full screen but that is cheating.
Booting into Single User Mode is the most "naked way" but the best (safest and most fun) way I've found it to load terminal instead of Finder in the startup like so:
defaults write com.apple.loginwindow Finder /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app
and to change it back to Finder as default:
defaults write com.apple.loginwindow Finder /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app
From terminal you can launch applications with:
open -a /Applications/Myprogram.app
where the -a is for .app file structure types and causes the application to load it's defaults for folder locations and etc. And place quotes around the path string when there are spaces in the file or folder name like:
open -a "/other applications/my program.app"
open .
will load finder and and open a window in the Current Directory. Notice the "." at the end there. If you enable the "Quit Finder" menu item you can just quit it again when done. If that's not enabled you can enable it from the terminal by typing:
defaults write com.apple.finder QuitMenuItem -bool YES
killall Finder
To open a file with it's associated default application just type:
open /path_to_files/applicationDataFile.xxx
For example in my system
open /path_to_files/awesomephoto.jpg
opens awesomephoto.jpg in Photoshop.
Tricking out your shell environment variables will save you a bunch of typing too.
