Don't Fear The Shell

So, I have noticed a rather alarming aversion to the command line (CLi) for developers. If you really think about it the CLi is not much different from a normal text editor.

Sure it can be somewhat intimidating when you open an application and you see bash-3.2$ what do I do with this... I agree I once felt overwhelmed when faced with the CLi. This magical black box tool until I spent some time getting to know it. Once I realized it was not much different from any other programming language you just interact with it a little different.

Also once I discovered Z Shell(zsh), iTerm2, and OHMyZSH did I feel comfortable working with applications without a GUI. Do not get me wrong I still use apps like Tower to work with Git since I feel more powerful using Tower. However, I am still comfortable using the CLi when needed such as using Git Bisect which can't be accomplished via tower, at least not that I know of.

You can take advantage of tools such as Bower for front end package management, Homebrew for OS X package management and Gulp.js to handle automating among other tools. You can also easily build your own Shell scripts to automate common tasks. I honestly believe it is faster and easier to build for the CLi mainly because you do not have to deal with options UI. If you have ever released an application with any sort of options you have felt this pain. It all ends up in a way kind of in the format of JSON any way we might as well cut out the middle man.

Using OHMyZSH you can add plugins and themes to increase the efficiency of your CLI usage. Over the course of the next few posts I will outline how simple it is to get started using the CLi. You shall no longer Fear the Shell.