Presented to attendees of RailsGirls Sydney Nov 2013. The command line. Developers' attitudes and common usage. How to improve your experience with it, from a beginner's perspective.

1. The Command Line
Your next best friend that you kinda still hate

2. What is it?
• Windows: cmd.exe
C:Usersmyusername>
• OSX/Linux: Terminal
computername:~ username $

3. What is it?

4. What do programmers
use it for?
In order of most frequent to least frequent:
git
git
git
git
git
git
git
git
git
git
git
status
grep
diff
add
log
checkout
commit
push
pull
show
rebase

5. What else?
rails
rails
rails
rails
new myapp
g model Blog title:string
console
db

6. What else?
rake routes
rake db:setup
rake db:migrate

7. Much Less Frequently
brew install rename # Mac
gem install rails
gem list -d
gem list -r
bundle
rvm use 1.9
rvm use 2.0

8. Why should I care?
One year from now you can automate your whole job...
git log $(git merge-base master branch)..branch
cut -f1,2 -d’ ’ ~/.bash_history | sort | uniq -c |
sort -nr | head -n 30
wget -mk http://www.stuff.to/read/on/the/train/
rsync -rvP myproject/ username@myhost/myproject.com/
pg_dump --clean -Z 9 app_master | ssh user@apphost
‘zcat | psql -h localhost -U app appdb’

9. Don’t Panic

10. Basics
cd projects/railsgirls/
cd ..
pwd
ls -l
#
#
#
#
change into a directory
get out of a directory
print current directory
list the files here
!
•
•
Pay attention to the “current directory”
•
Press tab to complete filenames
Press the up and down arrows to run previous
commands

11. Get Unstuck
man wget
(spacebar for next page, q to quit)
rails --help
Most reliable: Google “wget command”

12. Stay Focused
As a Rails developer, there
are only a handful of
commands you’ll use
regularly.
git
rspec
rake
rails
gem
bundle
irb
ruby
subl / vim
open
sudo
ssh

13. Next Steps
Incrementally improve your
command line capability

14. git config --global color.ui true

15. echo "alias ls='ls -ohG'" >> ~/.bash_profile

16. Shortcuts
up, down, tab
up, down, tab
up, down, tab
up, down, tab
up, down, tab

17. Ctrl-A
Ctrl-E
Alt-Delete
start of the line
end of the line
delete previous word
Works virtually anywhere! * **
* Terminal, Chrome, Sublime, Evernote, Keynote, XCode, LibreOffice, System Preferences, Gnome, KDE, XFCE4…
** Windows? Not sure.

18. More Shortcuts
Ctrl-C
Ctrl-R
Alt-B
Alt-F
Alt-D
stop current command (e.g. rails server)
search for a previous command
go back one word
go forwards one word
delete next word

19. Ctrl-R
1. Ctrl-R
2. Start typing (e.g. type “rebas”)
3. Ctrl-R to jump to next oldest match
4. Ctrl-S to jump to next newest match
5. Return to run, Esc to cancel

20. Configure Terminal

21. Configure iTerm2

22. Text

23. There Must Be a
Better Way!
There usually is

24. @gregmcintyre
microcourses.info