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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Good cushions

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.

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.

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

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