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.
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.
