tl;dr:“I was talking to a friend about how to add a directory to your PATH today. It’s something that feels “obvious” to me since I’ve been using the terminal for a long time, but when I searched for instructions for how to do it, I actually couldn’t find something that explained all of the steps. So I wanted to try to write down some more complete directions and mention some of the gotchas I’ve run into over the years.”
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!
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.”
tl;dr:“Let's find out how well you know computers! All of these programs have a variable number in them. Your mission: guess how big number needs to get before the program takes 1 second to run.”
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”.”
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!”
tl;dr:“Here’s a table of all 33 ASCII control characters, and what they do on my machine (on Mac OS), more or less. There are about a million caveats, but I’ll talk about what it means and all the problems with this diagram that I know about.
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.
tl;dr:“I wrote about how much I love fish in this blog post from 2017 and, 7 years of using it every day later, I’ve found even more reasons to love it. So I thought I’d write a new post with both the old reasons I loved it and some reasons.”
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.