this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
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Programming
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Not to take away how important reading these things are but I hate how people with a functional memory have no idea what life is like for people with poor memory. I would forget everything I read the minute button mashed the keyboard to quit the manual. It's like when trying to imagine what is like living as one of those people without an inner voice. It's such a foreign idea that its a shock when you realize some people don't have one
Bro’s not saying you have to memorize the manual, just like … read it. Even a bit of familiarity goes a long way.
If you have literally no memory then command line is 100% unusable but otherwise every little bit helps.
No memory is me being hyperbolic but it's severely limited. So I feel like reading a manual line by line means I get much less out of it but it's a large amount of time invested. So I have to factor in that my retention vs time on task is pretty skewed. It's frustrating. I need to do something a few times to learn. Learning by reading is not great for me. But tech is a very document heavy industry
So: read the man page, find the switches and options you need and hand write that bitch on a notepad, close the man page and execute the command. It’s tedious but it will help your not-great memory work a lot better.
Or easier, just fire up multiple tty's. The poor person's tabs.
What does tty mean in this context?
In this context it is multiple command line instances, like multiple terminals.
Thank you for the advice. I'll try that
Most people don't memorize things just by reading them. If you chose to construct some simple exercises/examples for yourself to learn by doing, this is very normal and in fact a good idea!
Thanks I'll give that a try.
https://tldr.sh/
https://cheat.sh/
I don't know if you mean you don't remember the gist even, but it's more about learning about what's possible with what so you can look up specifics when you need them than remembering the contents wholesale
This is exactly it. Do I have to read a reference for regex every damn time? Yes. But I also have an idea of what it can do; and knowing that, I have a vague idea when a problem presents itself that I could use regex to solve it.
Edit: Hello Zalgo my old friend.
This is great perspective and advice. It's how I learn too. I always felt like a poor performer because in my life I haven't been able to recall specifics after learning something when I compared to others. I've got a complex. But general what you describe is how I recall. Almost in chunks but not specifics.