What helps people get comfortable on the command line?

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨1000mH@hexbear.net⁩ to ⁨programming@programming.dev⁩

https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/08/08/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.

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bruhrrito@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Can’t live without oh-my-zsh, powerlevel10k and zsh autocomplete/autosuggestions plugins. It’s the first thing I install whenever I’m on a new computer.

And if I’m constrained to Windows (for work) then posh-git and PSReadLine is the next best thing.

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- atheken@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I’ve had ohmyzsh installed for years. TBH, I still don’t know what it gives me over bash. In your experience, what is the “killer feature” of zsh?
  
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  - fhoekstra@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Not OP, but I very recently switchedfrom bash. Autocomplete with suggestions is a way better exeperience on zsh than bash. The way you can choose between options of the autocomplete/suggest interactively feels way better than bash. I set it up to be case-insensitive, so I can type cd dow and it will become cd Downloads. Gettig autocomplete for both kubectl and its alias k is seamless in zshrc but requires an extra line with a weird dunder function in bashrc.
    
    This is just what I found in a few days of using it. There was no learning curve at all, everything just felt easier.
    
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- catapult7724@lemmy.sdfeu.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Thanks for naming these, I definitely need to look into them!
  
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- bnjmn@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  Can’t live without oh-my-zsh, powerlevel10k and zsh autocomplete/autosuggestions plugins. It’s the first thing I install whenever I’m on a new computer.
  
  I run this exact same setup, it’s pretty much a prereq on a fresh install. I wonder if we’ve all been exposed to the same blog articles
  
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- Shareni@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Fish: look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power
  
  I’ve seen quite a few articles on why you should never install oh-my-…s over the years. I’ve also never bothered to remember the reasoning past “install the plugins separately or you will suffer”, so someone please link if you know what I’m talking about.
  
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liliumstar@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨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.
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- StudioLE@programming.dev ⁨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…
  
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  - atheken@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I use git on the CLI exclusively. I almost never rebase, but otherwise get by with about 5-10 commands. One that will totally change your experience is git add -p
    
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MidwayTheMagnificent@wayfarershaven.eu ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
If their comfort level is limited due to lack of experience, I tend to sandbox them somehow and then walk them through a couple examples of “danger” vs “ok, this definitely won’t be irreversibel if it’s wrong, but I think it will do what I want.”

A couple of my go tos are the obvious rm -rf / vs ./ and a sed with and without -i on some random text file.

That naturally segues to “here’s the man page, here’s how to use it and search it.”

That tends to give them some confidence that they won’t accidentally cause real damage, and make it seem like they aren’t just typing arcane magic spells, but actually understanding how to responsibly put the pieces together.

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TheCee@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
It’s not exactly clear to me who is supposed to be more comfortable.

Anyhow:

Avoid commands that require their own DSL. Most DSLs are ad hoc garbage, in particular when it comes to UX and UI design.
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excel@lemmy.megumin.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
No need, GUIs are better for most tasks.

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- philm@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  It really depends. Maybe developing something like a game will require (almost) no CLI.
  
  But do a little bit more server stuff, dev-ops, and you can literally not even do the job without cli.
  
  Though in general, CLI is often better for the task, it often can easily be automated (via scripts etc.), which seems to be relevant for a lot of tasks programmers do…
  
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