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Spent 3 years typing every line by hand before someone showed me tab complete in my terminal
Last Tuesday I was pair programming with a guy from the IT desk at my work, just showing him a small script I use to track inventory counts, and he watched me type out a full file path four times in a row. He asked why I wasn't hitting Tab, and I honestly had no idea what he meant. I've been writing little Python scripts for maybe 3 years now, mostly copying things from YouTube videos and tweaking them, and I have typed every single path, variable name, and folder location by hand this entire time. He showed me that pressing Tab in the terminal finishes the name for you, and the arrow keys bring back what you typed before. I felt so dumb but also kind of relieved? Now I'm wondering what other basics I skipped. What was the small thing that made you realize you'd been doing it the hard way?
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taylor.mary7d ago
The "typed every single path, variable name, and folder location by hand" part hit me hard because I did the exact same thing with the up arrow key. For like two years I would retype whole commands from memory instead of just tapping up to get the last one back, and I remember my buddy watching me do it and just staring at me like I had two heads. What helped me was spending one slow afternoon just messing around in the terminal on purpose, hitting every key I never touched before, Tab and up and Ctrl+C and Ctrl+R, with no real goal other than seeing what happened. Ctrl+R especially blew my mind, you type part of an old command and it searches your history for you, no more scrolling back forever. My advice is to just pick one new shortcut a week and force yourself to use it until it sticks, because trying to learn them all at once is how you forget them all. Three years is nothing, half the people writing scripts out there are doing it the hard way too and just don't know it yet.
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