The POSIX spec is enormous (more than a thousand pages of dense legalese) and I don't believe most of the standard's developers have read it. People tend to specialize on one thing, so shell devs just look at the shell chapter, etc., and otherwise it's just control-F to search the document.
Occasionally someone (including me a few times) will raise an issue with a utility or library function and someone else will point out language in a completely unobvious paragraph in a different volume that actually controls the behavior.
I recently had a program complain that I sent EOF in interactive mode — “why?” it asked. Because it’s the thing that stops programs that don’t use Ctrl-c, I thought. Wish I could remember which program it was, it struck me as very weird
Nice article. Reminds me of this tangentially related one I wrote way back in the 1990s: https://adamspiers.org/computing/shells/
Last updated in 2004 but a surprising amount still applies!
Meta is just the way dinosaurs like me refer to the Alt key 😂 since when I first encountered shells in the 1990s it was on dumb terminals and UNIX workstations. But yeah these days all my keyboards have Alt not Meta. I use Escape on the rare occasions when Alt doesn't work.
Although just realised you might have already known that and I just accidentally mansplained 🤦🏻♂️ Sorry if so! These days I just assume most people are a lot younger than me and less likely to know the history
honestly I've never used Alt/Meta in the terminal because the way it works is kind of weird so I don't trust it (and also I'm not an emacs user so it doesn't come up much)
Ctrl-u is so ingrained here that I recall some years ago a GUI version of a gpg pinentry-type program didn't support it and I'm still angry about it. I also once tripped over gnome input sources which broke ctrl-u and wrote this https://bobcopeland.com/blog/2019/04/new-directions-in-commandline-editing/
This is maybe only tangential but I’ve been trying to get my Mac laptop to play nice with a VT131 terminal. I try to enable Xon/Xoff in stty, it just plain doesn’t work. Is it a weird Mac stty? USB Serial drivers? The kernel? No clue!
loved this blog! RSS followed
also til that helix's default theme is "nice"
I like a lot about helix, but the eye-fucking purple is the one default I think is completely insane
cool as an option, insane as a default
I recently left a job that required the use of zsh on macs. Ctrl-U worked quite differently from bash. If your cursor is in the middle of the line it erases the whole line in zsh, but only letters to the left in bash. Didn't realize I used that feature in bash so much I had to use zsh.
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But seriously, I am a professional Linux engineer, so I am all for constancy.
🤣🤣
Last updated in 2004 but a surprising amount still applies!
honestly I've never used Alt/Meta in the terminal because the way it works is kind of weird so I don't trust it (and also I'm not an emacs user so it doesn't come up much)
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME 🙏😭
> A lot of my understanding of the terminal is honestly still in the “subconscious pattern recognition” stage.
Hardcore chomskian linguistics vibes… this is ultimately what makes computer people better problem-googlers than laypeople, I think!
also til that helix's default theme is "nice"
I like a lot about helix, but the eye-fucking purple is the one default I think is completely insane
cool as an option, insane as a default
I'm always very apprehensive about reading and writing to the same thing on one line since I accidentally clobbered a file doing that once.
I try to use sponge (from moreutils) when I need to do something like that with files.
C^y to paste iirc
TIL!!