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.

  • bruhrrito
    11·
    1 year ago

    Can’t live without oh-my-zsh, powerlevel10k and zsh autocomplete/autosuggestions plugins. It’s the first thing I install whenever I’m on a new computer.

    And if I’m constrained to Windows (for work) then posh-git and PSReadLine is the next best thing.

    • atheken
      4·
      1 year ago

      I’ve had ohmyzsh installed for years. TBH, I still don’t know what it gives me over bash. In your experience, what is the “killer feature” of zsh?

      • fhoekstra
        4·
        1 year 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.

    • bnjmn
      2·
      1 year ago

      Can’t live without oh-my-zsh, powerlevel10k and zsh autocomplete/autosuggestions plugins. It’s the first thing I install whenever I’m on a new computer.

      I run this exact same setup, it’s pretty much a prereq on a fresh install. I wonder if we’ve all been exposed to the same blog articles

    • Shareni
      21·
      1 year ago

      Fish: look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power

      I’ve seen quite a few articles on why you should never install oh-my-…s over the years. I’ve also never bothered to remember anything past “install the plugins and prompt separately or you will suffer”, so someone please link if you know what I’m talking about.