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.
To be fair, I like to use VSCode for resolving merge conflicts, because it is easy to see the deviations and apply/edit as needed. Still, I use the CLI for everything else, including commiting that merge. Plus the gh cli client when I’m using github as I can create a repo or push a repo with zero effort.
It is possible to resolve conflicts through any text editor, but not an amazing experience.
