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.

  • FareshEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    Same for merge conflicts. I’m not sure you can even resolve them on the CLI

    How are they solved when using a GUI? When using cli, it simply tells auto-merging failed and you can open the conflicting files in a text editor and solve the conflicts, then add them and continue the merge.

    Managing branches: perhaps I’m a little too ott but I keep a lot of branches preserved locally, a GUI provides a decent tree structure for them whereas I assume on the command line I’d just get a long list.

    git log --graph --all --oneline

    There’s also --pretty, but it uses a lot of screen space.

    Managing stashes: unless you just want to apply latest stash (which admittedly is almost always the case) then I’d much rather check what I’m applying through a GUI first.

    You can attach a message when stashing with -m.

    And you can check them out by doing git checkout stash@{1} or similar.