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.

    • philm
      31·
      1 year ago

      It really depends. Maybe developing something like a game will require (almost) no CLI.

      But do a little bit more server stuff, dev-ops, and you can literally not even do the job without cli.

      Though in general, CLI is often better for the task, it often can easily be automated (via scripts etc.), which seems to be relevant for a lot of tasks programmers do…

    • 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.

    • CodeMonkey
      11·
      1 year ago

      GUIs are easier to learn, but they are not always available. Many services only have a CLI client. If you are connecting to a remote server or, especially, a container to debug it, it may not have a window manager installed. If you know how to do something via the CLI, you can automate it with a shell script.