→ ~ ▯The Terminal
When I first embarked on this journey of coding and learning a new languages. I didn’t know what to expect or what I was doing. I still don’t but that’s beyond the point.
What I want to talk about today is one of the most intimidating things I found in the beginning and that is “the terminal”. The terminal is where you will write a lot of cool stuff to make other cool things happen. Things that I still don’t understand like “bundle install”, which magically installs all the gems in a specific folder, to “yarn install — check-files” which I still don’t know what it does. It could be installing a virus for all I know, but that is what makes coding fun.
What I want you to take away from this blog is “DO NOT BE INTIMIDATED BY THE TERMINAL”
If you type “history” onto your terminal. It will reveal everything you’ve typed since the day your computer was born.
Try it out! I swear it won’t install a virus.
So now let me show you a few commands which you will be using a lot in your coding life. I have the history to prove it.
pwd
print working directory — The word directory is a fancy way of saying FOLDER. All your folders on your computer are dir or “directories”. What this command does It tells you where you’re standing.
cd ~
home directory — I don’t really know what this one stands for but It’ll take you home, try it out on your terminal. A good way to remember is this is the ~ looks like wavy clay roof shingles. now try and type “ls”, oh wait we haven’t gotten to ls yet.
ls
list — This will display a list of ALL the directories at your reach. Once you know where you are. An example of this is, a folder has a bunch of files. If you open an actual folder, you see all your files inside, cool! but sometimes you have other folders inside those folders. OH NO, HOW DO I ACCESS THOSE? that is where “cd” comes in
cd
change directory — using this syntax you can move around your directory
cd /somefile/anotherfile/imgage.js
cd ..
change directory back one — let’s say you typed the wrong name above and it took you to the wrong directory.
using “cd ..” will allow you to go backward.
How wild is that? I just wrote that without even using google. Here are some more commands which I don’t use often but are good to know.
clear
clear screen — it does just that, clears your TERMINAL so you don’t feel overwhelmed by all things stuff you’ve just written.
mkdir
make directory — wanna make a new FOLDER? type this
mkdir newfoldername
do not use spaces because that will create two different folders.
touch
create file — so a fodler has many files inside. This is how you create files.
touch frantelope.txt
will create a file called frantelope.txt wherever you are standing.
open
open file — opens file 👍
open frantelope.txt
take a break from learning. write a haiku inside that text file… save it and send it to paranoidfrandroid@gmail.com
history
shows all commands you’ve previously sent through. FUN!
this will come in handy when you get lost in GITHUB, but that’s for another blog.
cat
short for concatenate — ughhh all these fancy words I can’t handle this.
meaning link together in a chain or series
to tell you the truth I don’t really know what this one is doing, maybe we will save this for another blog.
say
this one is fun, unless you have Technophobia, or Robophobia you can skip this one. Type this into your terminal.
say “coding is fun!”
That’s all for today, I hope this helped! Whenever you’re feeling like you can’t code just remember, the things we practice often will become habits, and the things that we don’t will be hard.
For example, I remember what most of the top commands do but sometimes I forget what the bottom few do because I don’t use them as often. If you find yourself in that situation, write down the things you don’t do as often to remember them. If that makes any sense.
Good luck out there! YOU GOT THIS!
