It happens to you, to me and to every UNIX user since the 70s. Your system is (or should be) full of docs and tools to get help. One thing that I noted over the years, when we have new people at work, is that they don’t known how to get help from programs or they don’t known how to get help from their systems and when they struggle with anything, doesn’t matter how basic, they go to the web for help. I always show them this: apropos man help

What was that command to compress files? apropos compress Oh! it was gzip

What was that command to do whatever with the GRUB? apropos grub Oh yeah! update-grub

What about that command to download files? apropos download Oh! it’s wget

The next tip should be learn how to use and navigate in the man pages, man have it’s own man page; man man

There are different sections, section 1 is the default, you don’t need to specify, so you can just; man bash

But if you want to get help from configuration files you should type; man 5 sysctl.conf

Also, almost every program have a built in help compiled with the program code, you usually call it with --help or -h, sometimes just help and other times just call the program without parameters and it should print it.

Other people already suggest the cheat sheets, very useful especially for programas like vim or emacs, some of them come like a template to create a cube, so you print it and then craft it (like an origami) and you can have it in your physical desktop.

Last thing; be patience, your are in the rigth path, there’s always more than one way to do things, you just need to find your own way.

I suggest having a GNU command cheatsheet set as your wallpaper or getting a Linux cheatsheet deskmat.

Repetition is key and eventually you will get the hang of it.

Find a cheat sheet. There are hundreds out there – you probably want one for basic terminal commands, and one for whatever package manager you’re currently using.

The history command is also great if it’s something you do fairly often, but not often enough to remember clearly.

Use GUIs for all the things.

Linux users are obsessed with the command line because it’s faster if you can type fast and remember everything. If you can’t, GUIs are actually much much faster because you are visually guided towards what you’re looking for and have to spend little time looking for the correct commands and syntax and everything.

Use Fish (very good autocomplete) and aliases

I have around 10 “linux extract tar archive” online searches last year alone.

Use fzf to complete commands, use cmd line helpers like ‘tldr’

The gorilla bash llm thing has been immensely helpful.

https://gorilla.cs.berkeley.edu/

Back in the ancient pre-Internet days I worked for many years with a system called VMS made by Digital Equipment Corp (aka DEC), now long gone. VMS was a dream to use - every command and option was an actual word, and you could abbreviate commands and options any way you wanted, As long as you were unambiguous, it would figure out what you meant. So easy to learn, and felt so natural. Based on that alone I thought VMS would become more popular than Unix, with its cryptic commands, and those single-letter options that are sometimes the first letter of something obvious and other times seem totally random. But internally VMS wasn’t structured as well - for example, piping output from one command to another was possible, but it wasn’t geared for that like Unix is. There was also no free version of VMS, and it only ran on DEC hardware, so not that many people even knew about it. The dawn of Linux for PCs was essentially the nail in the coffin for VMS. But I do miss that CLI.

You could make aliases that are easier to remember for you.

If you e.g. had trouble remembering that mv does a rename, you could alias rename=mv. Ideally just put whatever you would have googled in “linux command to x” as the alias.

That’s the power of Linux; you can tweak everything to your preferences and needs.

You can make a cheatsheet and keep it on your desk

I just use guis

history | grep command you’re searching for

That will return all commands you’ve typed that contain that keyword. Helps if you remember part of a command, but can’t remember the specific flags or the proper format.

If there are common commands that you use over and over, turn them into a Bash script and name the script something descriptive.

I do that for long commands that I don’t want to type out, like my whole system update workflow: sudo apt update -y && sudo apt upgrade -y && sudo flatpak update -y

I saved that as a Bash script and called it “update.sh” then I saved it in my home directory. Now whenever I want to do a full system update, I just type ./update.sh and it asks me for my password, then updates my whole system without me having to do anything else. I do this with several different tasks like my remote Ansible server updates.

Other than that, you can buy/make a linux command cheat sheet with the most common commands. Keep it with you or next to your computer. Look at it whenever you need a refresh.

First of all, we are ALL in the same boat. Newcomers from whatever OS to professionals alike, we all struggle to remember commands and their idiosyncratic syntax.

Now that this is out of the way, namely that you are not “special” in having difficulties there, a little challenge. How do YOU normally do when you are learning something new? Typically when people do that, e.g. at school or while doing a professional training, they take notes. Are you doing that? I know it might sound “strange” but learning Linux is… well fundamentally learning so yes you can use whatever tools and techniques for that too. So… here are MY notes https://fabien.benetou.fr/Tools/Shell which will probably be rather pointless to you but at least prove that I’m not suggesting something I didn’t try first.

TL;DR: yes, use all the tools & tricks recommended here (IMHO with reverse-i-search first) but don’t forget to actually take notes!

Idea 1:

Print out some of the various CLI cheat sheets and pin them to your wall by where you work on your computer.

Maybe this one:

Then, print a page with commands you commonly use, either with more complex syntax or that aren’t on the sheet. (Like, “ls” is on there, but “ls -s -h” is not, for example.

Idea 2:

Write bash scripts to automate some of your commonly used tasks. Comment them. Imagine someone else is going to have to use them, even if you’re the only one who’s ever going to look at them. Not only will this help you learn lots of commands and force you to describe what they do (which will help you retain the information), it will be there as a record of how it works that you can go back and look at months or years later, to remind yourself how to do something.

Unless you want to increase productivity in specific field (say some kinds of software development) you won’t even need to remember anything more than cat, ls etc. In those specific usecases you’ll become habituated to the command you use frequently, nobody becomes a grep ninja on day 0.

Whenever I need something mildly complex with ffmpeg or imagemagick, the right command is just a web search away, I rarely remember syntax of these anyway. I find commands less obvious and harder to find for windows shell (technically powershell is cross platform btw), but maybe that’s because I’m not much familiar with windows-ism’

Tip: whenever you encounter a useful command syntax/one liner, save it with brief description. I find konsole’s built in quick commands quite handy, some other terminals probably have such features too. Otherwise a simple markdown list is enough.