Linux

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

The need to do it plus the realization that you can script anything based on it.

Drivers. Using recovery mode. Administration. Wanting to describe what to do rather then manually do it. Wild cards are really powerful and so is find and xargs. The text processing commands are useful too.

The other thing is having started computing in the 1970s. Everything was command line back then. GUI systems only become universal in about 1995.

Maybe controversial, but the fish shell. I know it's not strictly bash syntax, but the OOTB features are just so user-friendly. The most helpful features for learning: the autocomplete (with descriptions of subcommands and flags!) and the fuzzy history search.

I write bash scripts all the time, and am significantly more knowledgeable than anyone else on my team (admittedly frontend) because I got comfortable in fish.

Virtual environment? Taking notes of what they did?

Anyway, tell them it's okay you experiment and mess things up. Show them how to backup their important work. Then walk them through inevitably having to reinstall their distro.

They'll learn that you can just keep moving forward, fixing and learning as you go.

1. making it ✨pretty✨
2. using it a bunch
3. man pages
4. arch wiki

As someone who started with nothing but command line - Timex Sinclair, Apple IIe, DOS, I can’t even relate to the concept of being scared of command line.

Working in a remote environment

Colors. And a nice, readable font. Make your terminal pretty so you feel good every time you interact with it. Think about window dimensions (I personally always find the standard 80x24 too small), maybe set up some manual tiling so you can have two terminal windows fill your screen. Use the keyboard to move around your desktops.

But mostly, colors.

Stumbled across a game that teaches the command line as you play it. Seems like a good place to share https://gitlab.com/slackermedia/bashcrawl

personally, writing and saving simple scripts - IE project based learning - is how i got time in the saddle.

Play around in a virtual machine so you don't have to worry about messing anything up. Start with the basics such as navigating through directories and creating, editing, and moving files. If you break something, just restore a snapshot.

Clear instructions on how to do a clearly defined, specific task, in a failsoft manner, faster and easier, which helps them in a project they are doing now.

Step 1: Use a youtube tutorial for the basic commands. Don't worry, you'll forget about them soon enough. But doing them once, helps with muscle memory.

Step 2: When in need to do something, copy/paste from Q&A/forums various commands that they suggest for your problem. Your basic knowledge from step1 will come back as you do that.

After a few days, you'll be understanding what's going on and how the whole thing works in an abstract level.

To things that helps no mater your skill level the tab key is your best friend and man pages are great but if those are overwhelming install the package tldr then you can use the command tldr and the command you are trying to run to give you helpful examples of how to use that command.

Also old users don't remember long commands if we use a command more than once. You save it to your bash alias file to create your own commands.

Really specific here, but font control.

Us folks with dyslexia in its various expressions have trouble with command line. If you can't read a specific command, good luck ever getting comfortable with it. You can't error check yourself, so until you build up memory, you're kinda screwed if you can't use the fonts that are available.

Okay, this is not Linux-specific, but it's about a transferable skill:

What helped me get comfortable and learn a lot of basics was setting up NetBSD. The basic install throws you into a basic command line, with no graphical interface installed and not even the internet configured. But the online guide for setting the system up is incredibly well-written and teaches you all the concepts you need to know.

After doing this, I was familiar with a larger set of terminal commands, knew how to use vi, had a bunch of practice setting up config files in CLI and even finally learned how pipes work. It's a very enjoyable experience, the guide is so good I didn't feel overwhelmed once and anything you have to look up is tied to a problem you're solving (like cursor movement in vi).

It also teaches you how NetBSD is structured. It's not Linux, but similar enough to understand a lot of how and why things are done in Linux systems

What helps me is to understand what commands acronym means. For instance cp for copy, mkdir for make directory, blkid for block id, ls for list (not too sure about actual meaning for s) and so on!

Nice tips about ctrl+r to search in command history. Was not aware it existed!

In my experience repetition helped. Not memorization, but more like muscle memory.

Also, ensuring to never copy and paste commands but to type them in manually yourself. It's hard to enforce this on yourself, but worth it.

I appreciate that this article started with "ways to reduce risk" because that's an extremely valid concern and tied to why you shouldn't ever copy and paste. The one time in my early Linux forays where I copied and pasted I wiped the wrong drive. It definitely taught me to always manually type it in and not get too lazy, because what you copied might not match what you want to do exactly.