What helps people get comfortable on the command line?

Sometimes I talk to friends who need to use the command line, but are intimidated by it. I never really feel like I have good advice (I’ve been using the command line for too long), and so I asked some people on Mastodon:

if you just stopped being scared of the command line in the last year or three — what helped you?

This list is still a bit shorter than I would like, but I’m posting it in the hopes that I can collect some more answers. There obviously isn’t one single thing that works for everyone – different people take different paths.

I think there are three parts to getting comfortable: reducing risks, motivation and resources. I’ll start with risks, then a couple of motivations and then list some resources.

I’d add ImageMagick for image manipulation and conversion to the list. I use it to optimize jpg’s which led me to learn more about bash scripting.

  • @fhoekstra
    4•10 months ago

    Not OP, but I very recently switched from bash. Autocomplete with suggestions is a way better exeperience on zsh than bash. The way you can choose between options of the autocomplete/suggest interactively feels way better than bash. I set it up to be case-insensitive, so I can type cd dow and it will become cd Downloads. Gettig autocomplete for both kubectl and its alias k is seamless in zshrc but requires an extra line with a weird dunder function in bashrc.

    This is just what I found in a few days of using it. There was no learning curve at all, everything just felt easier.