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Comment by mychael | Hacker News Reader

I feel grateful for learning these tools before repos like this existed. Discovering new CLI tools back then was like learning about new bands by word of mouth – it made it more special.

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I remember finding out about ctrl+r, I thought it was incredible. The shell has so many helpful features and I'm continuously discovering more.

I was so happy when I found out ctrl+r. I can't believe I went so many years without using it, and now I use it constantly.

Now couple that with infinite bash command history and you never have to type out any command more than once.

Search for eternal bash history and set it up once. I can point out its usefulness more.

Feast your eyes on this, then: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

Before "repos" existed there already were widely available manuals, with exactly equivalent content as this repo. And excellent printed books, for example, "the unix programming environment" by Kernighan and Pike is a beautiful read, even if somewhat dated.

I don't need my job to be "special", I just want to be effective.

Some of use these outside our jobs.

I often wonder if I would have been able to achieve command-line fluency if I had been born 10 years later. GUIs just weren’t a thing when I was learning computers, so I had no choice but to learn to work on the command line. I can tell that it was time well spent now - I can script solutions to things that GUI-only folks sometimes spend hours repetitively doing “by hand”, but it took years to get to that point. I can’t entirely blame somebody for giving up and saying, “meh, the ‘long way’ is good enough”.

I'm considering going on a GUI cleanse and working command line only for a while to build my chops. Bold idea, or absolutely insane?

It's perfectly possible, and not that insane. Much more possible than most people likely think. The primary pain point is mostly web browsing - for a long time Elinks was the only halfway-viable web browser, and it has a lot of pain points. But maybe brow.sh is better these days - I've never tried it (although, arguably, running Firefox through a shoddy GUI inside a terminal doesn't really count as a "GUI cleanse".)

It's worth doing, purely for the enlightenment of freeing you from the busted, "macho" notion that a GUI is inferior to a command line. GUIs are awesome.

Probably insane, but if we were sane we wouldn’t be programmers, would we? ; ) I actually sometimes develop Java apps entirely on the command line using only shell scripts (no maven or gradle), so I have to download all the dependencies and resolve all the transitive dependencies myself. It’s a bit time consuming, but I end up discovering a lot of intricacies of some of the libraries I work with that I would never have come across otherwise. You can even debug using jdb, although at times System.out.println is less painful.

Just yesterday in the students room I whiteness the awe-inducing effect and joy of discovery that a proficient use of Vim has on someone who has never seen something like this before ;)

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