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.

  • StudioLE
    3·
    1 year ago

    -p –patch

    Interactively choose hunks of patch between the index and the work tree and add them to the index. This gives the user a chance to review the difference before adding modified contents to the index.

    This effectively runs add --interactive, but bypasses the initial command menu and directly jumps to the patch subcommand. See “Interactive mode” for details.

    The documentation is entirely meaningless? What does it do?

    • athekenEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      You can stage individual chunks of a file.

      Useful if you have a large set of changes you want to make separate commits for. I also just find that it’s a good way to do a review of each chunk before committing changes blindly.

      Give it a shot some time, worst case is you stage some stuff that you don’t want to commit, but it’s non-destructive.

      • StudioLE
        3·
        1 year ago

        I’ll occasionally

        1. stash my changes
        2. unstash them.
        3. Revise the file in my editor so only the chunk I want to commit is present
        4. Commit
        5. Unstash the changes again to get back the uncommitted change

        It’s clunky but it’s robust and safe. It does sound a lot cleaner to just use commit -p though

        • athekenEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          Yeah, -p can help with that. I’m not much for “commit grooming” - as long as a branch merges to main cleanly and passes tests, I don’t care about an “ugly” commit history.