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Comment by limedaring | Hacker News Reader

Hey, author/illustrator here. Of course this pops up on HN while I'm on a transatlantic flight.

Thanks for all the nice comments!

I made this specifically for folks who've only used GUIs and are used to having a designed shell around everything they do. That's why I illustrated the windows — at the small expense of readability, the goofiness/friendliness makes the topic more fun and less intimidating.

As shazow mentioned, I'm working on specific Linux (very few changes) and Windows versions (including instructions on using the Linux subsystem), and hopefully doing others on topics like git and whatnot — same model as this one, no signup forms or payments. That said, I am looking for sponsors to help fund my time in making these. If you (or your company) is interested, send me an email at tracy@hellowebbooks.com :)

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A nitpick, just in case you haven't noticed and would want to make the correction, in the text you say:

> In the example above, you see my username "limedaring", and my computer name, “Orion,”

but the examples say "username@computer".

Another nitpick, I wonder if readers might see the commands in uppercase and think that those should work too. I can imagine them seeing "command not found" when trying them out and not realize that it's because LS != ls to the shell.

Yet another, maybe it'd be a good idea to include `cp -r` and `cp -rv`. I don't know, it might add to the intimidation, but I imagine that's also a basic operation they'll want and miss when doing `cp dir/`.

Great work, by the way. CLIs are great and in many if not most cases far more powerful than GUIs, but they're often taken as old and useless by the general public because they were more prevalent back before GUIs were common. It's great to see something aimed to be more easily digestible for the general public. Maybe CLIs can get more appreciation this way.

Thanks for the nitpicks! Going to update the Mac version too when I release the Linux/Windows versions, this is super helpful.

Thanks for making this guide! I teach beginners how to use the command-line and I completely agree with your approach of mentioning its relation to Finder at the very start. Most students treat the shell as an entirely separate system with no relation to the GUI they're used to. Since your guide seems Mac focused (I didn't know about the trick with dragging the folder to get the path), I was surprised to see you not mention `open`. I tell students if they completely forget where they are in the system, run `open .` to get back to a friendly Finder.

One advantage of using illustrations is that they are more or less timeless as symbolic representations of the GUI. Novices can get distracted by screenshots that have minor differences from the OS versions between the author's and the readers'.

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