[eightysixfour]

There's a ton of reasons people are afraid of CLIs, here's a few:

1. Graphical UIs are inherently more discoverable. There's no way around this and "googling it" isn't a good enough answer.

2. Graphical UIs, for better and worse, hide or limit you from doing things that will break. Those guardrails reduce the fear associated with exploration. There are guardrails on CLIs as well (sudo), but we take for granted what those are and how they work.

3. You overestimate the level of skills required to function in modern society.

[stragies]

I just type "help" into anything that looks like a prompt. From there things are usually discoverable enough, and if not, now I have strings, that I can C/P straight into a search engine. ;)

[jolux]

  zsh: command not found: help

[nxc18]

Python help: Can’t open file ‘help’: [Errno 2] No such file or directory

Python -help: Unknown option: -e

Python —-help: actual help

Stupid users, it’s so intuitive!

(PS it always bugs me that every program uses a different option for checking the version. Node is -v, python is -V, dotnet is —-version. Again, couldn’t be more intuitive, duck users, right?)

[jolux]

I actually didn't know about python -V! python also accepts --version, but if you give it -v, that's verbose, which will only confuse people more. I believe java used to only accept -version with one hyphen, but now it accepts --version with two as well.

[boogies]

OpenBSD has a help command that’s basically just an alias for man, except without arguments it opens the manpage for help(1)¹. GNU help is a bash builtin for help with bash builtins, but does redirect to more general help.

  GNU bash, version 5.0.17(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
  These shell commands are defined internally.  Type `help' to see this list.
  Type `help name' to find out more about the function `name'.
  Use `info bash' to find out more about the shell in general.
  Use `man -k' or `info' to find out more about commands not in this list.

¹https://man.openbsd.org/help

[stragies]

yes, but now you know, into which shell you were dumped, and can gogle next steps! Don't you fully read the posts you reply to?

[jolux]

I read your post. You’re assuming a level of confidence that most non-programmers don’t have. I googled that exact message and nothing helpful came up.

[l0b0]

I wrote ~3000 words on how to find help for commands (and discovering which commands exist) for a book. It's not a trivial task at all.