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   Dr. Eric J. Fielding, PhD (ericfielding@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 03-Nov-2024 22:35:49 JST Dr. Eric J. Fielding, PhD

   in reply to

   • Julia Evans

   @b0rk I have used the tcsh shell for decades on various Linux and macOS machines but I recently switched to the zsh shell that is the default on macOS now. It is talking time to get all my command settings to work again. The dichotomy between the csh and sh shell families is a hassle.

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     Julia Evans (b0rk@social.jvns.ca)'s status on Sunday, 03-Nov-2024 22:35:50 JST Julia Evans

     in reply to

     some more UI conventions that make “the terminal” feel unified

     * there’s a loose standard for command line arguments that many programs follow (not all!)
     * TUI programs usually support using the mouse
     * interactive REPLs often use readline or imitate it

     i’m not sure how many of these are written down or standardized anywhere, it’s hard to imagine there’s a standard saying “you should imitate readline if appropriate” but maybe there is?

     (2/?)

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     Julia Evans (b0rk@social.jvns.ca)'s status on Sunday, 03-Nov-2024 22:35:52 JST Julia Evans

     been thinking about even though “the terminal” is technically not a single thing (it’s your shell, terminal emulator, OS, and programs) there are a ton of UI conventions that make the terminal feel like a unified environment, like

     * full screen programs like top often use “q” to quit
     * programs often turn off colour when writing to a pipe/file
     * if a program is displaying a lot of text, it’ll often open “less” to let you scroll

     a lot of these feel more like social conventions to me