Using it.

Ultimately it helps to understand the benefit of the command line: That text is a more effective mechansim for communicating that anything else. That any command you learn can easily to turned into a script an automated. That commands can be copied and pasted and shared with friends much easier than videos or images. Knowing it's benefit motivates you to learn it.

Look at the explanation in Windows for how to change a registry key or how to change a printer setting. It's one long guide full of screenshots thats painful to follow or understand. Where-as Linux users can easily share commands and fixes or tests over a simple irc chat, because the command line reaches the whole system.

The command line is of course a place where lots of apps can be plugged together and mixed up to achieve hundreds of goals, and thus learning awk, grep, sed, wc means you can count, search or perform regexes on any other part of the system, from counting users, or essays, to network connections, or processes or anything.

To be honest, many existing blogs answer exactly this question, which has been asked a million times before.

throw yourself to the wolves

embrace the wolves

I am using ZSH, that function that allows you to type part of the command and then do UP key to find previous command starts with same prefix is killer function for me.

(I don't know if this function is added by oh-my-zsh or not.)

One thing that wasn't mentioned in the article is default settings. In so many CLI programs (and FOSS in general), there seems to be some kind of allergy to default settings. I don't know whether it's a fear of doing the wrong thing, or a failure to sympathize with users who haven't spent the last three months up to their elbows in whatever the program does. But so often I've come to a new program, and if I've managed to stick with it, come to the realization later that at least half of the settings I needed to research for hours and enter manually every time could have been set to static defaults or easily-derived assumptions based on other settings in 99% of cases. Absolutely let your users override any and all defaults, but please use defaults.

I'd also be interested in the overlap between people saying, "LOL just get gud" about using the command line, and people who are terrified of using C++.

Progress indicators. Typing out a long command only to have it just sit there with no report is frustrating.

Use it inside a VM. Worst case you can restore a snapshot or just reinstall. No risk of not being able to boot

Growing up with limited capabilities (e.g. sh or ksh on headless SunOS/Solaris and AIX servers) and a lot of room for failure is what did it for me. I learned to think before typing, break things and fix them again. I still learn that way and I find that life without crutches and with lots of tinkering improves my understanding of how most things work and makes me more efficient in the long run.

Also man pages.

Write a shell script, for example, a script that uses rsync to back up your computer to another over SSH. Then make it rotate your old backups.

I'm a unique case because my first foray into Linux was using the CLI via SSH on a server, and I thought the CLI was insanely cool and was immediately hooked. So I don't really have any good advice other than to just force yourself to use it I guess?

Ironically, I have a more difficult time using desktop Linux just because it's not a headless environment like I'm used to. I still use it ofc.

Fish made me love the Terminal

i deleted my gui file manager and text editor. worked pretty well