Strategies for storing/recording/remembering CLI commands

chrisfeig

What strategies do people use to store, record or remember new or useful CLI commands?

For example, Anki is a useful flashcard spaced repetition memorisation tool. Or simply copying new or useful commands into a spreadsheet or cheat-sheet style document for reference until they're committed to memory through use.

luisviveropena

Hi @chrisfeig ,

I haven't used Anki, but it seems some participants find it useful. I use to save some commands to a file, but I think the best is to use the commands in the daily work, because if not, I forget them, hehehe.

Many regards,
Luis.

mainormainor

I guess anki is the answer because for those of us that do not work in a Linux environment there is no much options.

coop

Linux systems always have both man pages and built in help commands. So for example suppose you want to use "ls" but don't remember the exact usage. You can get a quick sense by doing:

ls --help | less

and get much more detail by doing

man ls

(ls --help actually is quite a long output but most commands are shorter)

Of course you have to remember the name of the command, but the number you have to have at your fingertips is not that large, because the UNIX philosophy to pipe simple commands together to do more complex tasks. Anyway, that is how most of us do day to day work, we don't try to look up things that much and explicit memorization really usually doesn't help that much because you cannot memorize all the possible options etc. you just have to remember there is some kind of option for doing that and then look at online resources to remind you of it

We all have different methods, but personally I just think there is too much to memorize. And I'm old enough that my short term memory is atrocious now, so something like Akami just would not work for me. Doing things does adjust my neurons some.

GRO 108

I use Dash (https://kapeli.com/dash) and find it really useful for snippets.

It's primary use-case is documentation reference but the snippet feature has lots of functionality, including integration with CLI (as well as bunch of other tools). That unlocks the ability to use snippet names as aliases on the CLI - without you needing to manually update your .bashrc file

You can also put placeholders in snippets. On expansion on the CLI it will prompt you to fill in the placeholders, very cool.

You can tag snippets to help with indexing. It's also very configurable.

I've put in one feature request for a consistent way to add annotations to snippets but you can get around this with comments.

The only thing that would make it complete would be if it were open-source or had a plugin-system to extend it's functionality.

mainormainor

@coop said:
Linux systems always have both man pages and built in help commands. So for example suppose you want to use "ls" but don't remember the exact usage. You can get a quick sense by doing:

ls --help | less

and get much more detail by doing

man ls

(ls --help actually is quite a long output but most commands are shorter)

Of course you have to remember the name of the command, but the number you have to have at your fingertips is not that large, because the UNIX philosophy to pipe simple commands together to do more complex tasks. Anyway, that is how most of us do day to day work, we don't try to look up things that much and explicit memorization really usually doesn't help that much because you cannot memorize all the possible options etc. you just have to remember there is some kind of option for doing that and then look at online resources to remind you of it

We all have different methods, but personally I just think there is too much to memorize. And I'm old enough that my short term memory is atrocious now, so something like Akami just would not work for me. Doing things does adjust my neurons some.

Very good point!