Some Terminal Frustrations

https://jvns.ca/blog/2025/02/05/some-terminal-frustrations/

by rcarmo • 1 year ago

4 2 1 year ago

discoverability (55) There were lots of comments about this, which all came down to the same basic complaint – it’s hard to discover useful tools or features! This comment kind of summed it all up:
How difficult it is to learn independently. Most of what I know is an assorted collection of stuff I’ve been told by random people over the years.

This is all too true, the discoverability aspect is one of the reasons why we exist (0), and there is lots to improve here for discovering terminal tools, how to install and use them.

Also thanks for running this survey Julia.

(0) https://terminaltrove.com/

sevensor• 1 year ago

I can understand why you’d merge frustrations about terminal emulators, terminal multiplexers, shells, tui programs, and cli programs. After all, they’re in the same place and they have to work together. What’s quite amazing is that we can swap out any layer, and the rest basically continues to function. (Although random term emulator plus ssh plus tmux plus text editor plus double width Unicode characters is probably always going to be a recipe for sadness.)

Learn, slowly but continually, miscellany that you can expect to reuse. Readline commands, ~. to kill an ssh connection, tmux scrollback / copy mode, how to use i, esc, and :wq in vi, how setting $TERM can make your life better. Don’t try to cram it into your brain all at once. Take a decade or two. It’s a messy, powerful complex of tools, and you only need some of them. Which ones depend on your circumstances.

As for the fear of dangerous commands, put Linux on a VM or a disused laptop and try them out. Very hard to do lasting damage; worst case is a reinstall. You’ll find that it’s actually harder than you think to do dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda1. Anyway, between backups and git, you should be able to recover from pretty much anything.

Some Terminal Frustrations

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