writing about the terminal is funny because it feels like a very intuitive and comfortable place to me, but the second I try to explain how anything actually works I realize there's SO MUCH I don't know and end up going down some extremely cursed rabbit holes - ThreadSky

b0rk.jvns.ca • 131 days ago

writing about the terminal is funny because it feels like a very intuitive and comfortable place to me, but the second I try to explain how anything actually works I realize there's SO MUCH I don't know and end up going down some extremely cursed rabbit holes

Comments

ennui.org•131 days ago

"cursed" i see what you did there

nedbat.com•131 days ago

It's been tough to explain to new learners that their terminals are actually terminal emulators. Terminals were originally a piece of hardware. "So they weren't computers?" Well, they were, but only in the sense that your microwave oven is a computer.... so much subtlety.

b0rk.jvns.ca•131 days ago

weirdly I don't find terminal history that helpful in understanding how the terminal works -- the separation between the terminal emulator and the OS terminal driver definitely exists but learning the history feels to me like it adds more unnecessary chaos to something that's already so complicated

nedbat.com•131 days ago

Yes, that is definitely true. When the Python Discord gets into this thread, it's always a distraction. But I find it an interesting pedagogical exercise to somehow explain it to those who are interested.

reachfh.bsky.social•128 days ago

The terminal is a kind of “lizard brain” computer

boomies-n-zoomies.bsky.social•131 days ago

Glad I’m not the only one who feels that way.

ashleyit.com•131 days ago

Sometimes history is helpful to explain things like carriage-return and linefeed. It's fun watching heads explode when you explain those.

frida-bosence.bsky.social•131 days ago

Such is the beautiful domino effect of DEC's success. To think many discovered the existence of the VT100 through terminal emulators is a fact I find ever amusing to this day.

lculibrk.bsky.social•131 days ago

Terminals are actually terminal WHAT

wozjosh.bsky.social•130 days ago

TIL i know waaaay less about terminals than I thought I did reading through these replies.....

digibanks99.bsky.social•131 days ago

Very very true. And also true for most everything one learns about...

mgilbir.bsky.social•131 days ago

With the upcoming release of ghostty 1.0, I expect some renewed interest on terminals. It will remain niche but I think some of your fantastic writing on how the terminal works sounds fantastic! Can’t wait to read!

https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-is-coming

blackstonecode.bsky.social•131 days ago

Footnote says Windows support is planned after the 1.0 release; I'll be interested in comparing it to mintty.

b0rk.jvns.ca•131 days ago

i've been trying out the ghostty beta a bit and I've been enjoying it! excited to see where the project goes, I LOVE that they have a "terminal inspector" like the CSS inspector but for the terminal. Feels like it could really be a gamechanger for helping folks understand what's happening

jagasantagostino.com•131 days ago

Do you have or know of any writeup to understand TUI better? It’s a weird topic where I find hard to understand if some old content is still relevant or things have changes since

mgilbir.bsky.social•131 days ago

Hello from another happy beta user 🙂

gomijacogeo.bsky.social•131 days ago

The history of terminals and text input is probably the closest analogy to biology in all of computing. "Q: Why do strawberries give me a rash?" "A: Well, half a billion years ago, a lamprey cleverly reused a molecule and then ANSI standardized it."

pck.rocks•131 days ago

And we appreciate it.

jwworth.bsky.social•131 days ago

It's a place were it's very useful to have mental models. Sometimes those models work, but aren't quite correct once you scratch the surface.

hosodatech.dev•131 days ago

Oh man, that's one mess of history that I've managed to avoid jumping into. The sheer quantity of topics in tech you can get lost in would take several lifetimes to get through, hahaha! 😅

ttkciar.bsky.social•131 days ago

IKR? It's such a fundamentally different mindset, too, and few of those rabbit holes actually help imparting that mindset.

markmadsen.bsky.social•131 days ago

Please don’t say cursed, it is too close to curses and I had to handle ports of that for xenix and sysV when I was in my 20s. Still have PTSD.

violetgrumble.bsky.social•131 days ago

Once the terminal clicked for me it all desire to use gui tools died. 🤣

swtbeat.bsky.social•131 days ago

What made it click? For years now I keep telling myself I just need to take the plunge, force myself to stop using guis but ugh…I’m SO SLOW and it’s infuriating

mochy.bsky.social•130 days ago

For me it was switching everything at home to 100% linux and pretty much forcing the issue with learning to install all kinds of distros, (on Proxmox,) plus learning ZFS all at the same time

I agree with the post above, 'ctrl-r' is life-changing

https://bsky.app/profile/mochy.bsky.social/post/3kt3qcet3qu26

violetgrumble.bsky.social•131 days ago

Just doing a lot of robotics dev/research. You kind of have no choice to get comfy in the terminal. You don’t need to stop using guis if that’s what works. My PhD and field of interest just necessitated the use of terminal all the time, and it became my preferred way of interacting with my computers

matei.busui.ro•130 days ago

if you're feeling slow you should check out the most popular shortcuts that make your life easier: up arrow for previous command(s), ctrl+r for search previous command, ctrl+u and ctrl+k for deleting everything to the right/left of your cursor, use your home+end keys more
^^ practice these

ottergauze.com•131 days ago

I remember helping a friend with doing some file searching and mass renaming. Some bulk shit that's super elegant in Bash and then I realised "wait they're on Windows" then I felt like my hands had been cut off because I DIDN'T KNOW HOW TO HELP

violetgrumble.bsky.social•131 days ago

When you open windows cmd and type ‘ls’ and get a “this command is not recognised”.

😡😡😡

ottergauze.com•131 days ago

deadass just actually true, yeah

easterman.neocities.org•131 days ago

cls is a better command than clear, that's the only Windows command I prefer

chedski.net•131 days ago

make them install git bash. problem solved!

kwyn.io•131 days ago

Oooo yeah Unix is… god speed that’s all I have to say.

halvacoffee.fyi•131 days ago

everything and anything involving terminals makes me shudder

mike.raccoon.bike•131 days ago

I have a new team member starting soon who's a data analyst with basically no command line experience. Any suggestions for resources for her? Our office is heavy on bash and unix cli tools

blackstonecode.bsky.social•131 days ago

I've seen this recommended recently, the "Really Friendly Command Line Intro" by Tracy Osborn. https://hellowebbooks.com/learn-command-line/

b0rk.jvns.ca•131 days ago

Maybe https://wizardzines.com/zines/bite-size-command-line would be useful? it's a reference for grep/sed/etc

matei.busui.ro•130 days ago

You can try out this one too: https://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Bourne.html#uh-1 (check the menu for other useful tutorials on common utilities like find, grep, sed, awk)

sebastiansolidwork.bsky.social•130 days ago

https://ss64.com/ is my friend.
CMD, PowerShell, Bash and more.

hicksca.dev•131 days ago

Been using Ghostty and kind of relearning some stuff ... and ya terminals are a very very deep rabbit hole.

matei.busui.ro•130 days ago

you should try making a small game or interesting app in libncurses
you'll get over it after that 😅

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