Linux

in my experience, practice, practice, and more practice. but "just git gud m8" isn't really helpful advice. if you don't have half a decade on hand, i can make a few more practical recommendations.

a shell that can do argument autocomplete is your best friend. personally, i use zsh + ohmyzsh + fzf + fzf-tab, but i'm sure there are other configs, and i've heard ohmyzsh is a bit of a nightmare, though i haven't had too many issues.

so let's say you're running the one rsync command this month, and you forgot the args, just tab-tab and you can search through the arguments with fzf.

Doing hackthebox or other CTF challenges, Using CLI software, writing bash scripts.

Breaking things.

Knowing:

• pwd, ls, cd, cat/less, cp, mv, rm, rmdir, rm -rf, ls -lah
• command --help
• man command | grep thing I care about
• bonus points if you have tldr command installed

Good cushions

Have someone on Google doing the thing I need to do.

Practice I guess. Especially using cli for specific tasks that is done more efficiently on there than the gui.

Moving files using regex for example is useful. Or finding files with specific phrases in them. Stuff like that

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.

For me it was self hosting, aka not having a choice but to learn. I'll be dead before using remote desktop for that.

Also, self hosting gives you real motivation, because you actually need to do things, carry tasks, not just learning for the sake of it. Your efforts get immediately rewarded with functioning things.

I have no clue... I grew up on Windows 3.11 and I thought Windows was kinda lame while MS-DOS was the coolest thing ever because you typed things like magic spells 😅

When you aren't in a rush try to do stuff in command instead, looking for a file? , try to find it in command. Need to copy and move a folder? Don't use your file manager, use the command line instead.

Eventually you will piece together the bits you learn and it starts to make sense, and then you feel like a God. Lol.

C:[Enter]
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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.

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.

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!

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.

Working in a remote environment

Okay, this is not Linux-specific, but it's about a transferable skill:

What helped me get comfortable and learn a lot of basics was setting up NetBSD. The basic install throws you into a basic command line, with no graphical interface installed and not even the internet configured. But the online guide for setting the system up is incredibly well-written and teaches you all the concepts you need to know.

After doing this, I was familiar with a larger set of terminal commands, knew how to use vi, had a bunch of practice setting up config files in CLI and even finally learned how pipes work. It's a very enjoyable experience, the guide is so good I didn't feel overwhelmed once and anything you have to look up is tied to a problem you're solving (like cursor movement in vi).

It also teaches you how NetBSD is structured. It's not Linux, but similar enough to understand a lot of how and why things are done in Linux systems

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.

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

Quake-style, baby.

Really specific here, but font control.

Us folks with dyslexia in its various expressions have trouble with command line. If you can't read a specific command, good luck ever getting comfortable with it. You can't error check yourself, so until you build up memory, you're kinda screwed if you can't use the fonts that are available.

I am a Linux noob as far as the desktop goes. But I'm quite comfortable in the terminal because for years I've maintained a home server running Debian. After I install the OS, I unplug the keyboard and monitor and the only way to talk to that box is through SSH.

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

To things that helps no mater your skill level the tab key is your best friend and man pages are great but if those are overwhelming install the package tldr then you can use the command tldr and the command you are trying to run to give you helpful examples of how to use that command.

Also old users don't remember long commands if we use a command more than once. You save it to your bash alias file to create your own commands.

tl;dr: Gradual exposure over time.

I got used to it through work, as I had to ssh into a server to run simulations. That mainly involved navigating the file system and text editing (which I used vim for) to make some basic Python and bash scripts, including sed and awk. The latter two I never got comfortable using, and haven't really touched since.

I was using macOS at the time, and after using that for work, the terminal in macOS got at first less scary and then a preferred way of accomplishing certain tasks. On my work Windows computer I started missing having a proper terminal around, and I eventually found Cygwin and later Git Bash to give me that terminal fix in Windows as well. Especially with the latter I noticed few differences and could use it to a large extent as I would have on my then Macbook.

2-3 years ago I was in need of a new computer, and at that point a laptop with Linux on it was not a very scary prospect. That is by no way saying I went into Linux as an expert, far from it, and I am still very much a newbie - but opening the terminal to work with things is not at all a barrier, which helps a lot if you use Linux and want to be able to do some changes from the defaults. If you don't want that, I think you can go far these days without opening the terminal, but it is certainly a good skill to have.

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.

Well, it's easy... just be born in the early 80s and grow up with home micros!

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

Knowing the commands

/

to search man pages was a gamechanger

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.