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.
For me it was using command line (linux/vim/sql/powershell) at work, for same mundane tasks over and over. Due to that, I started remembering commands so I didn’t have to look it up, and was more comfortable trying something I hadn’t done before as well.
I think this is an important lesson in general, and one that applies in other contexts:
You don’t need a “cheatsheet” for most stuff. The things you do all the time will become muscle memory, and the other stuff is easy enough to look up as it’s needed.
You don’t need to memorize the entire class structure of your projects. The “hot paths” get the most attention, and you’ll remember the most critical stuff as you work in a codebase. There’s lots of code that is basically “dark matter” - we know it’s there, and it’s doing something, but because we rarely review/modify it, it’s only important to understand its observable effects, not the precise way that it works.
Your brain is basically like an LRU cache - the stuff that you touch a lot will stay loaded, and the stuff that you rarely use will get dropped. Embrace this property.
