Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

It is so difficult to get others to understand my struggle with recollection with a sequence of letters and numbers, especially people in the tech field when I try to describe my issues with the command line. I keep being talked at that repetition and familiarity are what I need and it works for everyone and I just want hold their face and look at them like 'no. no it doesn't'.

And I'll have people point out 'well you write dialog well' and 'but you code HTML/CSS in text' and it's like... I desperately need you to know it's not the same.

You know why I am so good at dialog? Because the characters are having audible conversations with one another in my head. And when I'm reading, it's converted into 'sound' in my head, it doesn't remain text. It's easier for me to remember the concept and context of a thing, the idea of a thing, than the literal words used to express that thing.

When writing, it's easier for me to write dialog than descriptions because dialog sits in my mind back as audio, even if it's made up, and there's a direct translation of audio to words. But descriptions sit in my mind as pictures and feelings which does not have a direct literally translation. Sure I can list out the objects as they exist, but that isn't exactly very narratively compelling.

And when I'm writing HTML/CSS, I heavily rely on cutting and pasting, autofill, not to mention visual differentiation and indenting to make sure I don't loose my place. But almost none of it I can do from memory. There's a reason why I use Phoenix Code, and not like, notepad, I don't think I'd be near as good at it if I did.

You want to know how I remembered Phone Numbers as a kid? I remembered the dial tone sequences. I could be in a situation where I would not be able to repeat the phone number back or write it down, but get me in front of the phone and i touch the keys and hear the tone and then I remember the sequence without even looking at the numbers. I feel like my brain works in Raster and coding and command lines expect me to work in Vector. Like I know the approximation or idea of the thing, but I don't have the actual file, like the difference between a text file and an image of a text file.

And this makes the command line a nightmare.

For Example, this is the steps one has to take to add a new website to Apache.

sudo mkdir -p /var/www/domain.com/public_html
sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /var/www/domain.com/public_html
sudo cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf /etc/apache2/sites-available/domain.conf
sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/domain.conf
sudo a2ensite domain.com.conf
sudo service apache2 restart

I absolutely cannot remember this sequence if I were to write it all from scratch without a reference. And its not because I don't understand what is happening, I know exactly what it does!

1. Make a new directory
2. Change the owner of said directory to the user account
3. Copy and paste the default conf file to make a new one for a new domain
4. Edit the new conf file using Nano
5. Initialize the new site config
6. Restart Apache

The problem is, if I were to write all these out from memory it starts to become something like this:

sudo makedir -p /var/www/domain.com/public.html
sudo chown $USER /var/www/domain.com/public_html (this step can often be forgotten entirely)
sudo c p /apache2/sites/default.conf /apache2/sites/domain.conf
sudo nano /apache2/sites/domain.conf
sudo a2??site domain.com.conf
sudo service apache2 restart

And that's on a good day!!!! It feels like how it feels when I'm being asked to spell something without writing it down. Which may I point out, I've been historically very bad at spelling. It is extremely common for me to remember the vague approximate of the letters that exist in the pile of the word but completely loose track of where they are in the sequence they exist. The very act of writing feels like sentence that float above my head that I have to keep leaping up to pull it back down a letter at a time before it disappears from me entirely. It took me till my 30's before I could spell Necessary correctly without spell check, and even then I can't spell it without a visual in front of me.

So once you start getting into commands where it's like ` -u dphp -p` Man like.. I can't.. I can't remember that

d's can be easily mis-remembered as b's, h's, p's can be easily mis-remembered as q's a's o's depending on the text and some letters can be just completely forgotten in the sequence entirely.

In an environment like the command line where there is no room for error, that it must be exact and perfect every time, file paths must mirror 100% what exists it is an active source of stress for me to use the command line. I have to switch my brain into the OCR gear that barely functions. And there is nothing there to remind you or autofill or suggestion when you're typing, something that would remind me the things I'm forgetting, something I rely on heavily when I'm coding in HTML/CSS.

You know how I write anything? How I write this post? How I code? How I write scripts. I jump around! I started in the middle, worked at the beginning, I add to the end, I move things around. I do the same with HTML, too. I edit non-linearly

The command line, is live. There's no previews, no double checking, once it's in, it's in. And if you screw up, sure you MIGHT be able to fix it, but in MANY cases, you can't or might not know there's anything TOO fix until you're so deep into it you don't know where you made the mistake. Deleting files/directories is the most NERVE RACKING thing you can do on a command line, I wish I could do that visually x_x

I know a possible solution to some of this is to get a different shell to do the command line interfacing from, but I don't even know what to use and if any of them has like.. a guide to tell me what it will do before I commit the line to active? like 'these commands will result in this happening' sort of feedback, I'd feel a lot less lost with something like that. x_x