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
    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.