[mixmax]

You make some good points, let me try to answer.

First, I'm certainly not dismissing it. Yes, I'm frustrated, but I'm also aware that a lot of people much smarter than me swear by this tool, so there's obviously a lot of value there. I'm more dismayed by the learning curve. I come from a sales/marketing/ux/business kind of background so my mindset is different. I like my tools to be beautiful and intuitive. As simple as possible but no simpler as Einstein famously said.

The problem, as I see it, is that the commandline is like a marathon you have to run before you reap any rewards. Learning the commandline involves a whole sleuth of different things. Finding the right tools (I can infer from your post I obviously don't have those :-)), learning how filesystems work, unixy commands, git, cygwin, the list goes on. Seen from my perspective (and this might well be wrong) you basically have to have a good grasp of a whole boatload of ideas, technologies and concepts before a commandline tool is of any use to you. There's no easy way to learn a bit at a time. It's an either/or kind of deal.

I don't see any easy solutions to this, but I think it's a problem.

[gizmo686]

My experience is almost the complete opposite. The first time I touched the commandline was to apt-get packages in linux. Doing this invovled me learning nothing more than apt-get install, and apt-cache search.

I slowly accumulate knowledge of how to use other programs as I needed to use them (the same way I learn how to use gui programs.) The only conceptual block for me with the command-line was the concept of piping the output of one command into another.

[drivebyacct2]

>I don't see any easy solutions to this, but I think it's a problem.

Computers are complicated. Most users have no idea how hard. You HAVE to be willing to learn. I honestly have no idea what you expect and I don't think you do either. I don't honestly think there's anything to do.

[dredmorbius]

This.

As much as I recommend that a serious power user learn and use a solid shell (bash or zsh, as my earlier comment suggests), several nines worth of users probably never will do so. Many could, though it's still probably somewhere between 10-25% of all users who would really have the aptitude to do so. And I do feel that the time invested in learning good tools on a well engineered platform pays of in spades.

That said: general-purpose computers are hard to use, very complex, and far more users know how to use them in some small way but really have little or no deep understanding of what they're doing or why. It's something that the tablet/handheld market's addressing, though I fear that the inclination to turn these into pure consumption devices will ultimately torpedo this goal.