One of the first things you learn to do when you use a computer for the first time is to operate the mouse and type on the keyboard. At first, it goes slow. But as you become more competent, you interact with your computer and it responds as you want it to. But what does it really mean to interact with your computer? In the context of using a computer, the term interact simply means to exchange information or even simpler, send and receive information. Essentially, a computer sending data to you and you receive it. In turn, you also send some data to your computer and the computer receives it. I've talked about the mouse and the keyboard, but can you think of other ways in which you and your computer interact? Computers have various input and output devices. The input devices include a keyboard, mouse, microphone, camera, touch-sensitive devices, and so on. The output devices are things like speakers, monitors, headsets, and haptic devices to name just a few. You use all these devices to send data to a computer and receive data from it. But there's something else that supports communication with your devices. These are graphical user interfaces or GUIs which facilitate your interactions. GUIs are popular because they require very little training to use. GUIs offer an easy way to interact with devices, but they also somewhat limit the scope of human-computer interaction. As an alternative to GUIs and input devices such as microphones, you will learn to interact with your computer through the command line. The command line is a very powerful alternative because it allows developers to perform tasks quicker and with enough experience, less potential for errors. To use this powerful tool effectively, you need to have a certain level of knowledge. You might feel that the learning curve for the command line is a bit steep, but take it from me, the payoff is definitely worth it. By learning just a few commands, you can perform various tasks, such as creating new directories, creating new files, combining directories, copying and moving files around different directories, and searching through files using various criteria and keywords. As you become more advanced in using the command line, you will be able to perform tasks such as track software, access and control remote servers, search for files using specific criteria, unzip archives, access software manuals and display them in the command line. Install, upgrade, and uninstall software, and mount and unmount computer drives, or check disk space and so on. Pretty advanced stuff, don't you think? But the list goes on. You can write scripts to automate various tasks, control user access to files and programs, stop, start and restart programs. Create aliases of only a few characters long to initiate very long commands, download files from the Internet, run various software, and finally, run and control self-contained virtual software, which is also known as containerization. There are many, many ways to use the command line. But for now, I will guide you through some basic commands to get you started. First, the cd command, which stands for change directory. This is used to point our command line to a specific directory. For instance, a certain folder. For example, on Linux, if I type cd tilde, forward slash and desktop, I will point the command line to the desktop of my computer. When you type cd.. you will move out of the current directory and back into the parent directory. Next is the touch command, which makes a new file of whatever type you specify. For example, to build a brand new file, you can run touch followed by the new file's name, for instance, example.txt. Note that the newly created file will be empty. You can also make new folders using the mkdir command. For example, mkdir followed by the title you want to give the new folder. To view a history of the most recently typed commands, you can use the history command. There are many other commands that you can use, but with the ones I just introduced, you can already do quite a lot. I'll take you through a quick scenario as an example. Let's say you want to point the command line to the desktop directory and then add a new folder there titled myjsproject. Next, you want to point the command line to the myjsproject directory and make a new file, which you will call example.js. Finally, you want to open the example.js file in VS code. To do all of this, you will need to run the following commands. The first action you'll do is to use the change directory or cd command. Then you want to use the mkdir command to make the new folder. To move into the new folder directory, you use the cd command again, and then you use the touch command to create the file. The final command is the code command, which will open the file in VS code. If you've run all these commands correctly, you'll end up with a myjsproject directory on the desktop with the example.js file inside of it and additionally, that example.js file open inside VS code ready to be edited. In this video, you discovered that you can interact with computers on a more advanced level through the command line. You now have a better idea of what kind of advanced tasks the command line allows you to do. You are also ready to try out a few basic commands. I encourage you to start practicing some of these commands. Just like you got better and better at typing and moving the cursor with your mouse, I assure you that with practice you will soon use command line like a pro.
