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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I think 90% of the comments here are “write your own notes“ - which is possibly over simplistic.

Everyone’s different but IMHO:

The brain is better for imagination than long term storage. So if you’re stuck trying to remember some obscure command(s), it’s just better to use something else to store that on.

But when the brain understands the core concepts well enough, the details come together as habits (where repetition comes in).

So, if you’re unable to recall something, take some time to think / remind yourself about the underlying concepts and why that’s the command - next time it’ll be easier, eventually it’ll be effortless.

I had to learn some strange concepts for work during a deep technical troubleshooting session on a client’s system and the commands were like just facemashing the keyboard… I’ve no idea what those commands are now (written down), but I can recall what / why I was doing them and that was the key… for me.

(Using computers since '80s)

I use a snippet manager called keep.
It runs in the terminal, and helps remember commands. I use it for remembering commands with lots of flags and parameters that i don’t use often. But it can be used to remember any command you need.
You can also add comments to each command to remind you what it does.
I add the command i need to remember with
keep new
And when i forget it i can run
keep list
To get a list of commands.
It can do more, but i’ve only ever used those two functions.

Practice.

Practice.

Practice.

That’s really the best I can give you. The more you use the commands the easier they come to you.

Even novices can struggle with the command line. Don’t be afraid to search online for answers. I still need to look up arguments for things that I don’t use daily and I’ve been using Linux for almost 20 years now. Duck duck go and man are your friends.

One thing that I have found nice is using a shell that remembers what you have typed in the past because sometimes I will remember part of a command but not the whole thing, for example fish shell remembers commands and will start to auto fill commands that are typed as long as I have the beginning of the command correct and as long as I have typed the command in the past, which works wonders when you’re doing similar commands but with different file names or you are trying to remember the more advanced portions of git

A side note that I want to add regarding alternative shells be aware that every shell has its own strengths and weaknesses, for example fish shell is amazing for auto completion and plug in support, but it’s downside is it’s not compatible with standard bash Scripts and scripting as a whole on it is pretty mediocre

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.

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

Use Fish (very good autocomplete) and aliases

I remember the basic filesystem commands like ls, cp, mv, rm, cat etc, but I generally don’t remember much more than that. Even so, I still use the GUI file manager/software center pretty often, there’s no reason why I have to force myself to use the terminal all the time.

I have an app on my phone to search for commands that I barely use and don’t remember. Don’t worry that much about it if you aren’t a professional system administrator or other such jobs.

The gorilla bash llm thing has been immensely helpful.

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

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!

Stick to one distribution. Using notes is fine. Make aliases if necessary. You will learn with repetition.