Viewing the command line for the first time can be a daunting experience: a blank screen and a blinking cursor, with very little obvious help available on what to do. One of the biggest criticisms of the command line is that it lacks hugely in user experience. We’ll see how to install some tools later on in this chapter, and we’ll learn more about package registries in the next chapter. Package registries are like app stores, but (mostly) for command line based tools and software. If you're running any tooling for web development there's a near-guaranteed chance that you'll have to pop open the command line and run some commands to use your chosen tools (you'll often see such tools referred to as CLI tools - command line interface tools).Ī large number of tools can be used by typing commands into the command line many come pre-installed on your system, and a huge number of others are installable from package registries. The terminal is a text interface for executing text-based programs.
