I’m a Windows user of all life. But I love Linux. And these last two years after so many time I started learning it in deep . But one thing is bugging me is that I am those persons that has bad times remembering names, words… imagine commands… Even after using it so much I remember some basics but I’m struggling a lot and I have to go back to notes constantly to do some basic operations. Even worst after trying multiple distro from from different upstreams that commands are … Different. What would be your recommendations to help me. Are there tools to help this issue ? My guess is that A LOT of people happens the same. And it’s one of the reasons Linux has such a slow adption . Because is excellent and full of capabilities.
Apart from fzf that helps me find recently used commands and also files and directories easily, I also use tldr that gives you a simple cheat sheet for every command and very often saves you trawling through endless man pages.
The gorilla bash llm thing has been immensely helpful.
Amazing, thank you
Up arrow
or
“history” if you’re a psychopath
history | grep whateveris quite useful when you just barely remember a command or the files you used it on.Also use alias for it like “hist” then do “hist stuff”
First of all, we are ALL in the same boat. Newcomers from whatever OS to professionals alike, we all struggle to remember commands and their idiosyncratic syntax.
Now that this is out of the way, namely that you are not “special” in having difficulties there, a little challenge. How do YOU normally do when you are learning something new? Typically when people do that, e.g. at school or while doing a professional training, they take notes. Are you doing that? I know it might sound “strange” but learning Linux is… well fundamentally learning so yes you can use whatever tools and techniques for that too. So… here are MY notes https://fabien.benetou.fr/Tools/Shell which will probably be rather pointless to you but at least prove that I’m not suggesting something I didn’t try first.
TL;DR: yes, use all the tools & tricks recommended here (IMHO with reverse-i-search first) but don’t forget to actually take notes!
Thank you! i will check them. Yep im a long time user of Obsidian and i have notes everywhere. But going to them , when i dont have much free time to spend, it also feels like a tool would be amazing to simplify the get into complex command.
It’s a balance, namely you are probably wasting time if you jolt down literally everything… but also what you don’t write down and forget, have no way to backtrack, will also waste time.
IMHO it’s the process itself that matters, namely that by taking the time to write down, organize, lookup, you gradually have to do it less and less because you are more conscious about what you know, what you don’t, and adapt accordingly.
If you do find a better way, based on a tool or not, please do share back!
Around 2012-2014 it was common to have Conky print things like system information or keyboard shortcuts in the desktop.
I think Conky is still around although less popular now. You could look into that though.
This is just an example from an image search for Conky desktop, but it gives you an idea how information can be displayed https://live.staticflickr.com/4062/4543953032_e6d7473206.jpg
That looks pretty tight, thanks
Unless you want to increase productivity in specific field (say some kinds of software development) you won’t even need to remember anything more than cat, ls etc. In those specific usecases you’ll become habituated to the command you use frequently, nobody becomes a grep ninja on day 0.
Whenever I need something mildly complex with ffmpeg or imagemagick, the right command is just a web search away, I rarely remember syntax of these anyway. I find commands less obvious and harder to find for windows shell (technically powershell is cross platform btw), but maybe that’s because I’m not much familiar with windows-ism’
Tip: whenever you encounter a useful command syntax/one liner, save it with brief description. I find konsole’s built in quick commands quite handy, some other terminals probably have such features too. Otherwise a simple markdown list is enough.
Probably not very helpful in this case but a very nice resource for learning cli is:
I remember the basic filesystem commands like ls, cp, mv, rm, cat etc, but I generally don’t remember much more than that. Even so, I still use the GUI file manager/software center pretty often, there’s no reason why I have to force myself to use the terminal all the time.
I have an app on my phone to search for commands that I barely use and don’t remember. Don’t worry that much about it if you aren’t a professional system administrator or other such jobs.
repetition…repetition…repetition…repetition…repetition…repetition…repetition…repetition…lol
I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.
~ Bruce Lee
Man is great to check quickly what something does. I use atuin as my shell history to make it a lot easier to search
You know atuin is legit because the demo gif on their site is using GruvBox, the most bestest color scheme.
It happens to you, to me and to every UNIX user since the 70s. Your system is (or should be) full of docs and tools to get help. One thing that I noted over the years, when we have new people at work, is that they don’t known how to get help from programs or they don’t known how to get help from their systems and when they struggle with anything, doesn’t matter how basic, they go to the web for help. I always show them this:
aproposmanhelpWhat was that command to compress files?
apropos compressOh! it was gzipWhat was that command to do whatever with the GRUB?
apropos grubOh yeah! update-grubWhat about that command to download files?
apropos downloadOh! it’s wgetThe next tip should be learn how to use and navigate in the
manpages, man have it’s own man page;man manThere are different sections, section 1 is the default, you don’t need to specify, so you can just;
man bashBut if you want to get help from configuration files you should type;
man 5 sysctl.confAlso, almost every program have a built in help compiled with the program code, you usually call it with --help or -h, sometimes just help and other times just call the program without parameters and it should print it.
Other people already suggest the cheat sheets, very useful especially for programas like vim or emacs, some of them come like a template to create a cube, so you print it and then craft it (like an origami) and you can have it in your physical desktop.
Last thing; be patience, your are in the rigth path, there’s always more than one way to do things, you just need to find your own way.
Thank you!
I made a comment about how easy it was to learn VMS was (an 80s/90s OS). How do I print a file? I’ll try PRINT. Okay, that works. How do I make 6 copies? PRINT /COPIES=6. Great! But how do I print to a file? I’ll try PRINT /OUTPUT=filename. Well whaddya know!
I loved that OS like a brother. Sadly it eventually went the way of every proprietary system.
This reply made me smile. You are not going to believe me but I’m a millenian… and I worked with OpenVMS (yes, you guess rigth, in a bank). May I tell you? Yes, sorry;
2012, first week as a SysAdmin in that hell bank, I made the mistake of saying “My fetish are old OS and computers” (this is true), “Well, we have this four VMS baremetal machines that nobody wants to touch and if they fail we fuck up all”. After learning to be quiet and don’t speak too much I found a VMS manual in TPB or some other site (I remebered downloading it as a torrent) and started using the pre ones (two of this machines where pre and two prod). I found that AWK was installed and a POSIX Korn Shell was sleeping there and nobody knew it, with only that I did a lot of stuff like Nagios custom monitoring (yes, this machines wasn’t in the monitoring system, if there is not a red dot isn’t broken) and automated things like the IPLs. I’m not going to say that VMS is a brother, but I feel comfortable with it even for a UNIX admin. The best part of this boring story is that, some months ago I was chatting with one old coworker that is stills in that bank, they still have this machines and they still use my shitty scripts for monitoring and getting data and statistics, can’t believe (and a little proud of) that a OS that was developed before I was born is still up and running my programs.
Not a boring story at all, in fact it’s Awesome! It’s been so long since I touched VMS I would probably be lost now, but I wrote tons of apps and was a sysadmin for a couple years - which I really enjoyed, as 90% of that job was running backups and installing updates, leaving plenty of time to just play around. I missed writing apps, so I made a visual status monitor that let me look at running processes and pause, restart or kill them. My last exposure to VMS was when I worked at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in 2007 or 8 - a group there still had a VaxCluster running, but I never worked on it. Today there is still OpenVMS, mostly run on emulators by retro computing hobbyists I think.
There’s nothing wrong with notes. I keep a text file open permanently at work and home with all my notes in it. I have a bunch of commands in it to copy-paste. Or Ctrl+r and type to search the history.
But if you want to memorize, I usually use flash cards.
I partly remember the first letter and press arrow up.
I use ZSH shell with oh-my-zsh. It autofills the rest with history at the point you write. So arrow keys make you scroll through the history which is beginning with the thing you wrote
Same with fish.
Fish is even more advanced with this.
But I still prefer ZSH because of shell language being incompatible with fish. I dislike learning that thing, when I have everywhere new Linux shells with bash
This is my boat with fish shell at the moment, like I started learning how to make scripts with it, and I very quickly realized that it’s definitely a minority shell, and that it’s not worth it to make scripts for, it’s missing functionality that normal bash has and has zero functionality with existing Scripts so I’m finding myself having to switch to bash anyway for most scripting.
I never really tried zsh, I might tinker with it if it does have that functionality as that’s the part I really like about fish
I also heard that the same functions are also possible in bash with plugins.
Maybe start with “oh-my-bash”?
I’d never replace bash with fish, but it’s a great tool for when I don’t know or cannot remember a command of argument.
You could make aliases that are easier to remember for you.
If you e.g. had trouble remembering that
mvdoes a rename, you couldalias rename=mv. Ideally just put whatever you would have googled in “linux command to x” as the alias.That’s the power of Linux; you can tweak everything to your preferences and needs.
Wild had no idea—this is so cool. If you do this, does the original command also still function (so like I could rename to something easier for me, but hopefully transition to the real deal at some point/ properly follow help forums or suggested pasted commands)
The originals remain untouched.
It is possible to override existing commands with aliases though. This is useful for setting flags by default. I have
alias ls='ls --color'for instance such that whenever I runls, it actually runsls --color, providing colourful output.Note that aliases are only a concept within your command line shell though. Any other program running
lsinternally won’t have the flag added and wouldn’t be able to use any of the other aliases either (not that it would know about them).It’s very easy to program your own “proper” commands though on Linux. If you had some procedure where you execute multiple commands in some order with some arguments that may depend on the outputs of previous commands, you could write all that as a shell script, give it some custom name, put it in your
$PATHand run it like any other command.Also very cool—the building in default modifiers to the command. Thanks for the great tips.
