Using it.
Also, the fact that most common use-cases are very common makes using the command line very google-able. Oh, you need to create thumbnails from a folder of 10000 video files, then rotate, crop, rename and archive them? Guess what, you are not the first.
This is the best part about it for me. It’s like finding the perfect code snippet or example for what you’re trying to do, but for all kinds of stuff on your computer and not just inside whatever project you’re working on.
I’m not any kind of command line guru, but the terminal is the first thing I open any time I fire up one of my VMs.
Ultimately it helps to understand the benefit of the command line: That text is a more effective mechansim for communicating that anything else. That any command you learn can easily to turned into a script an automated. That commands can be copied and pasted and shared with friends much easier than videos or images. Knowing it’s benefit motivates you to learn it.
Look at the explanation in Windows for how to change a registry key or how to change a printer setting. It’s one long guide full of screenshots thats painful to follow or understand. Where-as Linux users can easily share commands and fixes or tests over a simple irc chat, because the command line reaches the whole system.
The command line is of course a place where lots of apps can be plugged together and mixed up to achieve hundreds of goals, and thus learning awk, grep, sed, wc means you can count, search or perform regexes on any other part of the system, from counting users, or essays, to network connections, or processes or anything.
To be honest, many existing blogs answer exactly this question, which has been asked a million times before.
I agree with most of what you said, except for the Windows examples. The pages that you linked begin with three-line TL;DRs that are enough for any barely-competent user to find and modify the necessary settings. While the full instructions may be tortuously detailed, are they actually hard to understand?
And sure, those Windows pages don’t advance the user’s knowledge in any meaningful way, but neither does blindly copying and pasting a line of shell commands.
By the way, while I appreciate that we’re talking about if and how CLI is superior to GUI, and not Linux versus Windows…
Where-as Linux users can easily share commands and fixes or tests over a simple irc chat, because the command line reaches the whole system.
… both of those tasks can be done via CLI in Windows, too. I am very happy that I switched to Linux, but there’s no reason to misrepresent the other guys.
throw yourself to the wolves
embrace the wolves
I am using ZSH, that function that allows you to type part of the command and then do UP key to find previous command starts with same prefix is killer function for me.
(I don’t know if this function is added by oh-my-zsh or not.)
One thing that wasn’t mentioned in the article is default settings. In so many CLI programs (and FOSS in general), there seems to be some kind of allergy to default settings. I don’t know whether it’s a fear of doing the wrong thing, or a failure to sympathize with users who haven’t spent the last three months up to their elbows in whatever the program does. But so often I’ve come to a new program, and if I’ve managed to stick with it, come to the realization later that at least half of the settings I needed to research for hours and enter manually every time could have been set to static defaults or easily-derived assumptions based on other settings in 99% of cases. Absolutely let your users override any and all defaults, but please use defaults.
I’d also be interested in the overlap between people saying, “LOL just get gud” about using the command line, and people who are terrified of using C++.
