What helps people get comfortable on the command line?

1000mH [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.net to Programming@programming.dev – 35 points –
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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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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.

-p --patch

Interactively choose hunks of patch between the index and the work tree and add them to the index. This gives the user a chance to review the difference before adding modified contents to the index.

This effectively runs add --interactive, but bypasses the initial command menu and directly jumps to the patch subcommand. See “Interactive mode” for details.

The documentation is entirely meaningless? What does it do?

You can stage individual chunks of a file.

Useful if you have a large set of changes you want to make separate commits for. I also just find that it’s a good way to do a review of each chunk before committing changes blindly.

Give it a shot some time, worst case is you stage some stuff that you don’t want to commit, but it’s non-destructive.

I'll occasionally

  1. stash my changes

  2. unstash them.

  3. Revise the file in my editor so only the chunk I want to commit is present

  4. Commit

  5. Unstash the changes again to get back the uncommitted change

It's clunky but it's robust and safe. It does sound a lot cleaner to just use commit -p though

Yeah, -p can help with that. I’m not much for “commit grooming” - as long as a branch merges to main cleanly and passes tests, I don’t care about an “ugly” commit history.

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.

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.