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.

  • xXthrowawayXx [none/use name]English
    2•1 year ago

    Eh, none of this is really addressing the fundamentals of getting comfortable figuring out how to do what you wanna do, which is what in my experience leads to people seeing command line use as magic incantations.

    Like, if you’re on windows you know how to figure out how to do what you wanna do, right click a file, look for entries in the context menu, look at the properties, open with, etc.

    This works because people fundamentally understand the metaphor behind the operating system.

    If you’re in bash and don’t know how to do what you wanna do you don’t need any of this fancy zoomer shit, just use “which”, “man”, whatever your package manager offers and the other commands that had big oriley books written about em.

    People need to develop the command line equivalent of the “click around and see if you learn anything” skills.

    E: I gave the linked article another read and it really is about setting up a production environment in the command line and not about getting people comfortable with the command line at all.

    Like, if someone needs to cut down a tree in their front yard they don’t need to know how to operate a felller-buncher, they need to know how to use an axe handle to judge where the tree will fall and what it will fall on.