What helps people get comfortable on the command line?

jvns.ca 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.

Programming @programming.dev

sizeoftheuniverse @programming.dev

2y ago

What helps people get comfortable on the command line?

jvns.ca /blog/2023/08/08/what-helps-people-get-comfortable-on-the-command-line-/

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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.
- 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?
  
  Not OP, but I very recently switched from 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.
- 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
- and fzf for Ctrl+R drop-in replacement
- Thanks for naming these, I definitely need to look into them!
- 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 anything past "install the plugins and prompt separately or you will suffer", so someone please link if you know what I'm talking about.

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.
Edit: And yeah, git. I've never used a graphical client. Seen a handful in use and don't like it.
- 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...
  
  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
  I also have my diff/mergetool configured to use kaleidoscope, but still do everything else in the CLI.
  
  Same for merge conflicts. I’m not sure you can even resolve them on the CLI
  How are they solved when using a GUI? When using cli, it simply tells auto-merging failed and you can open the conflicting files in a text editor and solve the conflicts, then add them and continue the merge.
  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.
  git log --graph --all --oneline
  There's also --pretty, but it uses a lot of screen space.
  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.
  You can attach a message when stashing with -m.
  And you can check them out by doing git checkout stash@{1} or similar.
  
  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.
  
  I also exclusively use the git CLI. I have tried to use a graphical client and could never figure out what it was doing and what was going on. I probably picked it up so easily because when I learned git, I was already used to using a CLI version control client. At the time, I was working at a company that heavily used Perforce and had a custom wrapper around the p4 cli that injected a bunch of custom configuration.

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

What did it for me is I stubbornly refused to use Git via VSCode and stuck with the terminal. I also stubbornly refused to change my default text editor for GIT to something other than VIM. One light bulb moment I had, funnily enough, was when I finally read the VIM docs and learned how to save and close rather than panicking when it popped up (this was early on.... but not THAT early on ... so still funny). That sparked my curiosity to truly learn VIM.
After that, I realized command line tools could be learned and advantageous and so it just went up from there.
Honestly, I've noticed a difference in the confidence level of peers using command line tools based on whether or not they learned GIT using command line or jumped straight to just clicking the buttons in VSCode.

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.

Maybe see if you can introduce them to a GitHub project or tool that you think they'll find interesting or useful. I know there are a ton, but I'm not coming up with anything off the top of my head. But if you can give someone a reason to be in the CLI, then they may start to branch out a bit more. I started learning more about the CLI when I started seeing it as cool. Yes, I'm a nerd.

I knew basic CLI commands (such as cd and ls) for a while, but did not do learn much more. Some things have helped me grow my skills:
Necessity: Some times I need to do something on a VM or container that does not have a graphical interface installed. Some utilities only have a command line interface and not a graphical client. My only option is to Google how to do it. The more I do it, the less I have to Google and the more focused my searches become (instead of searching for "How to do x", I search for "How to do x in utility").
Learning from others: For many tasks, I follow internal or external guides, which typically use CLI commands. Often I look at how my coworkers accomplish tasks and pay attention to what commands they use. Then, when I have time, I look up any new commands I saw and decide if they will be useful for me too. Lately, I have been doing code reviews that involve shell scripts. Those are especially nice, because I can take my time, going line by line, and understand what each command does.
Keep notes: Every time I find a command that I think I will need again, I copy it into a text file (and I have many such text files). It also makes it easier when I need to run the command with slightly different arguments (a different commit id or something), I can just edit the command in my editor (with searching and undo) and paste it in to my terminal with all the flags and arguments correct.
- 2nd on the keep notes suggestion. I work on lots of unrelated projects, and each time I end up learning a bunch of new command line utilities, so I try to leave behind a text file describing some of the most useful commands I'd discovered that day. Usually helps me come back to a project and not be back at square one every time.

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.

Fun little utilities: robotfindskitten, cowsay, ponysay, botsay, sl, aafire, bb, viewing videos in the terminal with "mpv, --vo=tct" and perhaps feedgame that comes with orbiton. Htop is also pretty colorful. Lazygit and mc too.

Eh, none of this is really addressing the fundamentals of getting comfortable figuring out how to do what you wanna do, which is what in my experience leads to people seeing command line use as magic incantations.
Like, if you’re on windows you know how to figure out how to do what you wanna do, right click a file, look for entries in the context menu, look at the properties, open with, etc.
This works because people fundamentally understand the metaphor behind the operating system.
If you’re in bash and don’t know how to do what you wanna do you don’t need any of this fancy zoomer shit, just use “which”, “man”, whatever your package manager offers and the other commands that had big oriley books written about em.
People need to develop the command line equivalent of the “click around and see if you learn anything” skills.
E: I gave the linked article another read and it really is about setting up a production environment in the command line and not about getting people comfortable with the command line at all.
Like, if someone needs to cut down a tree in their front yard they don’t need to know how to operate a felller-buncher, they need to know how to use an axe handle to judge where the tree will fall and what it will fall on.

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.

Electroshock. I that is too "harsh" or "inhumane" then a cheat sheet.
At the end of the day the command line is a tool that you are using to do something. If I have to google "how to commit file changes to bitbucket using the command line", I'm probably just going to use whatever GUI tool is available. Or I may do something really silly like manually copy the changes into bitbucket's web interface. If I had a cheat sheet easily available, then I would just look at that. The rest is just practice and repetition.
Just throwing this out there. It really helps if everyone on the team is comfortable enough to ask for help. If you are a manager, it's your job to create this kind of environment. And if you see some newbie data analyst that just learned python and is intimidated by a bunch of software engineers copying a bunch of changes into bitbucket's web interface. Don't tell them that they are doing it wrong or they don't know what they are doing. Just say "hey, there is a much easier way to do that" and then show them. If a tool makes somebody's job easier then they will use it.

I use Minecraft with my students to introduce them to command-line-like scripting. Especially the worldedit plugin is fantastic for this. It keeps things light and shows them the power of scripting, in an environment they are familiar and comfortable with. They are much more comfortable with using a terminal/cmd afterwards.

No need, GUIs are better for most tasks.
- 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...
- They basically aren’t?
  If you’re doing one-off hobbyist stuff, maybe.
  But literally anything in a professional setting should be in text that can be committed and searched in a source code repository. If you can’t commit it to git, it didn’t happen.
  
  Logging called, they want their . log files back
  
  you could document the steps required in text and add Screenshots.
- GUIs are easier to learn, but they are not always available. Many services only have a CLI client. If you are connecting to a remote server or, especially, a container to debug it, it may not have a window manager installed. If you know how to do something via the CLI, you can automate it with a shell script.

41 comments