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Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

> Bookmarking this to peer at until I internalize the apps. There's even an Ubuntu package for them.

Ditto. But I will probably forget they exist and go do the same old silly kludges with subshells and redirections. May I ask if anyone has a technique for introducing new CL tools into their everyday workflow?

It helps if things have good man, apropos and help responses, but the problem is not how new tools function, rather remembering that they exist at all.

Sometimes I think I want a kind of terminal "clippy" that says:

"Looks like you're trying to match using regular expressions, would you like me to fzf that for you?"

Then again, maybe not.

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My two cents on this is that if you do something enough that one of these tools is a good tool for it, it’ll quickly become a habit to use the tool. And if there’s a rare case where one of these tools would have been useful but you forgot it existed, you’re probably not wasting too much time using a hackier solution.

That being said, I’ve been meaning to add a Linux and Mac install.sh script to my dotfiles repo for installing all my CLI tools, and that could probably serve as a good reminder of all the tools you’ve come across over the years that might provide some value.

> May I ask if anyone has a technique for introducing new CL tools into their everyday workflow?

Pick one tool a year. Write it on a sticky note on your monitor. Every time you're doing something on the command line, ask yourself "would $TOOL be useful here?".

You're not going to have high throughput on learning new tools this way, but it'll be pretty effective for the tools you do learn.

When you learn about a tool, actually think about a specific situation/use case where you would actually use it. Try it out as soon as you learn about it. I find I can only do one tool at a time. You remember it better if it’s something you would use frequently at the moment. If I get a big old list of useful stuff, I’d be lucky to actually incorporate more than 2 of them. At a time anyway. If you don’t remember the tool, it’s probably because you wouldn’t use it enough to retain knowledge of it..

I like this one. Thanks. Mentally binding a new tool name specifically to one regular task sounds like a good entry point for a repeated learning framework.

Flashcard software like Mnemosyne. Seriously. I use it to keep reminding me of keyboard shortcuts until I've ingrained them in my workflow.

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