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.
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.
