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.

  • athekenEnglish
    21·
    1 year ago

    They basically aren’t?

    If you’re doing one-off hobbyist stuff, maybe.

    But literally anything in a professional setting should be in text that can be committed and searched in a source code repository. If you can’t commit it to git, it didn’t happen.

      • athekenEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        I’m not sure if you’re being funny, but of course committing the output of your program isn’t what I was saying.

      • athekenEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        That’s fine until a UI changes, or the steps to reproduce it are incomplete (or a human doesn’t follow them exactly).

        Text commands are unambiguous and precise.