Does anybody know of some good resource(s) for learning to use Terminal more effectively?
Well, what specifically are the roadblocks you're running into? ls, cd, and mkdir are pretty much 90% of working with the filesystem via the CLI.
Two more that you might find useful:
open - Opens a file with a normal macOS GUI program the same way that double-clicking it in the Finder would do. To open a file with a different program than the default, you can use the -a flag. For example, if you have a CSV file which would open in a spreadsheet program by default but you want to open it in TextEdit instead, "open file.csv -a TextEdit". Using "open" on a directory will open that directory in a Finder window. (Note that this is a Mac-specific command and not part of POSIX standard, though some GUI-friendly Linuxes have an "open" which does similar things.)
ln (that's a lower-case ell) - Creates a symbolic link, or an alias in traditional Mac parlance. You'll pretty much exclusively want to use this with the -s flag to create a soft link, since it creates a hard link by default; you can research the difference between those on your own if you'd like (and I'm totally not just saying that because I can't remember the difference myself off the top of my head). "ln -s /path/to/original.file /path/to/symlink/location.file" is how it's used. Using "ls -l" will show you which files in a directory are symlinks and what files they point to. Note that if you create a symlink with a relative path to the original file , that path will stay relative, so if you then move the symlink to a different directory it'll try to point to an entirely different file in absolute path terms.
If you really want to be a CLI power-user, though, you're going to want to learn an editor. And by an editor I mean vi or some variant (if someone tries to get you to use emacs, do like the Saturday morning cartoons told you and just say no). It can be really difficult to get started on this since it works so differently to pretty much every GUI text editor since MacWrite. The most elementary thing to grasp is that there are two modes of operation; insert mode, where you type the desired content of the file, and command mode, where you enter commands to copy and paste lines, search and replace, save the file, and quit the program. You need to switch between the two depending on what task you're trying to achieve. Obviously a full vi tutorial is outside the scope of a single message board post, so I suggest getting a book, watching videos, or however you prefer to learn.
In other news… Rumor-monger Ming-Chi Kuo is
mongering some nice rumors about this year's MBPs ditching the Touch Bar. The Touch Bar was a flop among most professionals, including those that had a workflow which used function keys often; the first Touch Bars didn't even have a physical escape key, which would have been a pain when trying to use the aforementioned vi. But I think an even more obvious indicator that the idea was a flop would be that no other hardware manufacturers ever tried to copy it… They're also apparently
reverting features in newer versions of macOS which allowed certain blessed software to bypass software VPNs or content blockers to do things like call home to Apple. These are two power user-friendly moves and between this and the return of the cheese grater last year - which apparently
won't be replaced by Cube 2.0 after all - show that Apple is paying a lot more attention to the near-universal wishes of power users and pros than they have in recent memory.
