Learn the Command Line

It does, and most of Unix command line tools can be installed painlessly via brew or port (Mac package managers).

There are reasons to install Linux on a Mac, but general purpose unix command line isn't one of them.

Just from the perspective of mapping sentence meanings to bash commands, that's a difficult thing to do. But going beyond that, I think there are issues having to do with the ambiguity of language that just aren't solvable, period.

Take your example: "Show me all my files, including my hidden ones". That, to me, should show all the files on the entire system where I am the owner. Even as someone who ostensibly knows some bash, you missed that you dropped some pieces of data which are relevant in bash terms. "my" indicates ownership, and nowhere in your sentence did you say to limit the function to the current directory. If you're making that mistake as an experienced user, what hope does a beginner have?

`ls -a` actually encodes a fairly complex query, which only becomes apparent when you attempt to really nail down what it does in a natural language. To produce `ls -a`, you would really have to type something like "List the names of all the files, folders, and symbolic links in the current directory that are visible to the current user." You could, of course, start making assumptions about certain parts of this, similar to how `ls` does, but then you get into users guessing which part of the sentences they can elide (why wouldn't we assume that "List the names of the files, folders, and symbolic links in the current directory" wouldn't show us all the files, folders, and symbolic links?). At that point, the user must learn the idiosyncrasies of which exact sentence they have to type in to get what they want: i.e. when they have to say "all", when saying "my" matters instead of saying "the", etc. At that point the natural language stuff is no longer a learning tool, it's a separate, very complicated thing for the student to learn in addition to what they are trying to learn.

As another example of this: if you're willing to accept some ambiguity, why did you choose `ls -a` instead of `find .`? Recognizing that `ls -a` and `find .` do very different things.

To summarize: I don't think it's a bad idea, just an impossible one. :)

vim is available, and if you know how to use it, it doesn't seem to know what text editor you're using. At least, that was my experience.

But I'll also agree that the edit bash_profile stuff was repetitive. I might have preferred something in there about symbolic links or ownership and permissions.

If you're interested in more, I recently wrote a short book about learning Bash scripting: https://gumroad.com/l/datascience

In the book, I use "adventures" to demonstrate Bash concepts, where I guide the reader through using the command line to answer questions such as: What's the average tip of a NYC cab driver? Is there a correlation between a country's GDP and life expectancy? etc

If you're looking for another beginner friendly command line resource, I'd be interested in having you go through the below, and doing a comparison.

http://www.gotealeaf.com/books/command_line