What helps people get comfortable on the command line? (jvns.ca)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by 1000mH@hexbear.net to c/programming@programming.dev

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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.

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[-] liliumstar@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That's a good article. From my observation, there are a few things:

Necessity. I'm active in communities with people who don't use the terminal until it's an absolute necessity. Like people running unraid, docker, or whatever containerized server. Eventually they need to type commands.
The prettiness. Yeah, I run oh-my-zsh. It's nice having a setup pretty environment. Some people's only experience might be opening up the powershell default display to run one command... And that is a bad experience.
Niche commands/programs. Take ffmpeg as an example. It's probably the most powerful media tool that exists, but has no official gui. And it's expansive enough that no GUI really covers what it can do. There are a bunch of other things like this.

Edit: And yeah, git. I've never used a graphical client. Seen a handful in use and don't like it.

[-] StudioLE@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

You've never used a graphical git client?!

I'm comfortable on the command line but a decent git UI is a way better experience.

git diff is so basic using a GUI makes it far easier to compare changes.

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

Any form of rebase: I think I used the CLI to do an interactive rebase a few times in the early days but I'd never do so without a GUI now.

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.

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.

There are some things I still use the CLI for though:

git remote add git remote set-url because I'm just too lazy to figure out how to do that in a GUI. It's usually hidden away somewhere.

git push --force because every GUI makes it such an effort. C'mon! I know what I'm doing - it's /probably/ not going to mess things up...

[-] CodeMonkey@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago

I also exclusively use the git CLI. I have tried to use a graphical client and could never figure out what it was doing and what was going on. I probably picked it up so easily because when I learned git, I was already used to using a CLI version control client. At the time, I was working at a company that heavily used Perforce and had a custom wrapper around the p4 cli that injected a bunch of custom configuration.

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this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023

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