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

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Do everything on your command line.

Why click and drag files when you can mv *.png

Why use an IDE when you can setup vim (or space vim on neo vim) to load all the plugins your IDE would need, but only for the particular tasks that would leverage all those plugins (saving you overhead when you're not leveraging those plugins)

Why use word when you can use pdflatex to turn your .tex files into .PDFs, with vim setup to trigger pdflatex on every post buffer write event, while zathura renders the PDF automatically

Why manually start your code, when you can set it up to trigger automatically at start up or in response to other events

The answer, of course, is because it's effort. The pay off is getting marginally better on a skill curve with an infinite ceiling. But the point being, anything your computer does, can be interacted with functions and variables / data structures, and can be automated with shell languages