/Terminal

Some Cool Terminal Things I've Found Recently

- Neil Macy tl;dr: “I had the morning off work today. So I did what anyone would do, and started playing around with my Terminal setup. There are some things that have bugged me for a while, and some things that I've meant to try out for a while, and this seemed like a good chance to play around.”

featured in #591

Some Terminal Frustrations

- Julia Evans tl;dr: “A few weeks ago I ran a terminal survey and at the end I asked: “What’s the most frustrating thing about using the terminal for you?” 1600 people answered, and I decided to spend a few days categorizing all the responses. Julia shares the categories of responses here!

featured in #588

What's Involved In Getting A “Modern" Terminal Setup?

- Julia Evans tl;dr: “There are so many pieces to having a modern terminal experience. I wish it all came out of the box. My immediate reaction was “oh, getting a modern terminal experience isn’t that hard, you just need to….”, but the more I thought about it, the longer the “you just need to…” list got, and I kept thinking about more and more caveats. So I thought I would write down some notes about what it means to me personally to have a “modern” terminal experience and what I think can make it hard for people to get there.”

featured in #581

"Rules" That Terminal Programs Follow

- Julia Evans tl;dr: “It’s very useful for me to know what behaviour to expect from a random new terminal program that I’m using. Instead of “uh, programs could do literally anything”, it’s “ok, here are the basic rules I expect, and then I can keep a short mental list of exceptions”. I’m just writing down what I’ve observed about how programs behave in my 20 years of using the terminal, why I think they behave that way, and some examples of cases where that rule is “broken”.”

featured in #574

Why Pipes Sometimes Get “Stuck": Buffering

- Julia Evans tl;dr: “The reason why “pipes get stuck” sometimes is that it’s VERY common for programs to buffer their output before writing it to a pipe or file. So the pipe is working fine, the problem is that the program never even wrote the data to the pipe!”

featured in #571

Terminal Colours Are Tricky

- Julia Evans tl;dr: “Yesterday I was thinking about how long it took me to get a color scheme in my terminal that I was mostly happy with, and it made me wonder what about terminal colours made it so hard.” Julia asked people what problems they’ve run into with colours in the terminal, and shared some of the problems and fixes. 

featured in #555

Entering Text In The Terminal Is Complicated

- Julia Evans tl;dr: Julia asked her network what was confusing about working in the terminal, and one thing that stood out to me was “editing a command you already typed in”. Julia shares why this is hard and some tips she’s picked up along the way. 

featured in #531

How Terminal Works

- Vasiliy Kevroletin tl;dr: “This blog series explains how modern terminals and command-line tools work. The primary goal here is to learn by experimenting. I’ll provide Linux tools to debug every component mentioned in the discussion.”

featured in #522

State Of The Terminal

- Gregory Anders tl;dr: “We’ll discuss some of the problems that terminal based applications have historically had to deal with and what the modern solutions are, as well as some features that modern terminal emulators support that you may not be aware of.”

featured in #497

A Year Of Building For The Terminal

- Darren Burns tl;dr: Over the course of the year, I’ve been able to work on a lot of really cool things. In this post, I’ll review a subset of the more interesting and visual stuff I’ve built. If you’re into terminals and command line tooling, you’ll hopefully see at least one thing of interest!

featured in #377