If you’ve never used the terminal before, how do you know what to type?
Start pushing buttons. Start typing things, try pressing tab variously. Look up guides, introductions, help. Yes it’s not like the discovery of gui where you get to discover whatever the developer of the gui made available to you. It’s a deeper kind of discovery of what more you can do with command line that you cant do with gui. The gui lets you point at pictures provided. The command line lets you string commands together, like stringing words together to form sentences, to have a more nuanced conversation of your own making. So yes, there’s a different initial hurdle and learning curve. Well worth getting over through. Understandable how this is missed by those coming from where the command line is really limited and the gui tries to be all (even if that all is limited). The good stuff’s over the hurdle, and keeps getting better as you progress along the learning curve, deep into the wide delta of potential, where we each become each others teachers.
Sure, but my point is: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a terminal present those instructions when you open it. Unless it’s immediately shown in some MOTD or something, the average user isn’t going to take the time to figure it out if they don’t have to.
If my grandmother wanted to draft a letter on her computer, she’d use something that looks more like Notepad and less like Vi.
Yep, for sure there’s room for improvement here. Perhaps someone can provide some configurations, pull requests, forks, or even entirely new shells, that do prioritise upfront documentation for new users who wont go out of their way to find the documentation to learn.
Start pushing buttons. Start typing things, try pressing tab variously. Look up guides, introductions, help. Yes it’s not like the discovery of gui where you get to discover whatever the developer of the gui made available to you. It’s a deeper kind of discovery of what more you can do with command line that you cant do with gui. The gui lets you point at pictures provided. The command line lets you string commands together, like stringing words together to form sentences, to have a more nuanced conversation of your own making. So yes, there’s a different initial hurdle and learning curve. Well worth getting over through. Understandable how this is missed by those coming from where the command line is really limited and the gui tries to be all (even if that all is limited). The good stuff’s over the hurdle, and keeps getting better as you progress along the learning curve, deep into the wide delta of potential, where we each become each others teachers.
Sure, but my point is: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a terminal present those instructions when you open it. Unless it’s immediately shown in some MOTD or something, the average user isn’t going to take the time to figure it out if they don’t have to.
If my grandmother wanted to draft a letter on her computer, she’d use something that looks more like Notepad and less like Vi.
Yep, for sure there’s room for improvement here. Perhaps someone can provide some configurations, pull requests, forks, or even entirely new shells, that do prioritise upfront documentation for new users who wont go out of their way to find the documentation to learn.