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What helps people get comfortable on the command line? (jvns.ca)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/programming

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

git add -p is great to know, but IMO one shouldn't rely on it too much, because one should strive committing early and often (which eliminates the need for that command). Also using git add -p has the risk of accidentally not adding some code that actually belongs to the change you are trying to commit. That has happened to me sometimes in the past and only later do I see that the changes I commited are broken because I excluded some code that I thought didn't belong to that feature.

[–] atheken 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

There are other reasons to use it. A major one is doing a “code review” of changes before committing, or even deciding to drop a chunk of code from a commit entirely (like a debug statement that no longer is necessary.)

I’m all about frequent commits (and right-sized commits), but the functionality can still be beneficial even in those scenarios.

I also don’t care if I have a broken commit. This turns up very quickly, and there is zero expectation that feature branches are always in a working/stable state. The expectation is that pending work gets off the local machine on a regular interval.