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What helps people get comfortable on the command line? (jvns.ca)
submitted 2 years ago* by to c/programming@programming.dev
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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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[–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

-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?

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    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

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