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.

  • @IonicFrogEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    Electroshock. I that is too “harsh” or “inhumane” then a cheat sheet.

    At the end of the day the command line is a tool that you are using to do something. If I have to google “how to commit file changes to bitbucket using the command line”, I’m probably just going to use whatever GUI tool is available. Or I may do something really silly like manually copy the changes into bitbucket’s web interface. If I had a cheat sheet easily available, then I would just look at that. The rest is just practice and repetition.

    Just throwing this out there. It really helps if everyone on the team is comfortable enough to ask for help. If you are a manager, it’s your job to create this kind of environment. And if you see some newbie data analyst that just learned python and is intimidated by a bunch of software engineers copying a bunch of changes into bitbucket’s web interface. Don’t tell them that they are doing it wrong or they don’t know what they are doing. Just say “hey, there is a much easier way to do that” and then show them. If a tool makes somebody’s job easier then they will use it.