Mastering the command line? A few observations. First, consult and take notes (yes, even seasoned terminal veterans forget syntax.) Secondly, embrace tab completion. It’s your friend, and a surprisingly effective substitute for remembering every single command. Third, the true test: procure a VPS or remote server and exclusively use the command line. No GUI crutches allowed. It’s a digital wilderness, and you’ll learn to navigate it.

Lastly, and this is non-negotiable: keep a terminal window permanently resident on your desktop. Consider it a vital organ, deserving of its space. It’s a constant reminder of the power you wield, and a readily available portal to a world beyond the pretty buttons.

I think just doing it more, and thinking it’s cool to interact more directly. At least that helps me. I do feel bad for dyslexic peiple though, it’s a lot harder for them to use CLI.

Using computers since before GUI was available… Sometimes I think we ought to go back to it

I set it so when I hit CTRL-Tilde it drops down from the top of the screen.

Quake-style, baby.

Maybe controversial, but the fish shell. I know it’s not strictly bash syntax, but the OOTB features are just so user-friendly. The most helpful features for learning: the autocomplete (with descriptions of subcommands and flags!) and the fuzzy history search.

I write bash scripts all the time, and am significantly more knowledgeable than anyone else on my team (admittedly frontend) because I got comfortable in fish.

For me, it was having a cool-looking and user-friendly terminal app.

As someone who started with nothing but command line - Timex Sinclair, Apple IIe, DOS, I can’t even relate to the concept of being scared of command line.

Virtual environment? Taking notes of what they did?

Anyway, tell them it’s okay you experiment and mess things up. Show them how to backup their important work. Then walk them through inevitably having to reinstall their distro.

They’ll learn that you can just keep moving forward, fixing and learning as you go.

The need to do it plus the realization that you can script anything based on it.

Drivers. Using recovery mode. Administration. Wanting to describe what to do rather then manually do it. Wild cards are really powerful and so is find and xargs. The text processing commands are useful too.

The other thing is having started computing in the 1970s. Everything was command line back then. GUI systems only become universal in about 1995.

Working in a remote environment

Colors. And a nice, readable font. Make your terminal pretty so you feel good every time you interact with it. Think about window dimensions (I personally always find the standard 80x24 too small), maybe set up some manual tiling so you can have two terminal windows fill your screen. Use the keyboard to move around your desktops.

But mostly, colors.

Stumbled across a game that teaches the command line as you play it. Seems like a good place to share https://gitlab.com/slackermedia/bashcrawl

personally, writing and saving simple scripts - IE project based learning - is how i got time in the saddle.

What helps me is to understand what commands acronym means. For instance cp for copy, mkdir for make directory, blkid for block id, ls for list (not too sure about actual meaning for s) and so on!

Nice tips about ctrl+r to search in command history. Was not aware it existed!

In my experience repetition helped. Not memorization, but more like muscle memory.

Also, ensuring to never copy and paste commands but to type them in manually yourself. It’s hard to enforce this on yourself, but worth it.

I appreciate that this article started with “ways to reduce risk” because that’s an extremely valid concern and tied to why you shouldn’t ever copy and paste. The one time in my early Linux forays where I copied and pasted I wiped the wrong drive. It definitely taught me to always manually type it in and not get too lazy, because what you copied might not match what you want to do exactly.