Stop Starting your Commands with Dollar Signs

We humans are creatures of habit. When I see this. I double click, copy the line and without fail:

$: command not found

I will bet this happens to more people than just me. Now I need to break my flow and carefully select around the dollar sign. The little efficiency savings allows me to stay in flow and get my work done more quickly.

If your command is in a code block, the user knows to copy it in the terminal. And if your user doesn’t know to copy it into a terminal, using a dollar sign will not be sufficient to communicate that.

Mac even uses the percent sign instead, further lessening the validity of the dollar sign as the “copy this into terminal” symbol.

That was a concise claim for why not to start your commands with dollar signs. Thank you for listening.