Julia Evans
a small meta-thought on education: a statement like "you can use the mouse in the terminal” is much less helpful than "here are 6 specific programs you might already use (tmux, htop, neovim, less, lazygit, …) and specifically how you can use the mouse in them”
choosing the right specific examples is pretty hard but it makes a huge difference, I sometimes feel like half my job is picking the right examples
Julia Evans
@johntimaeus thanks, that makes sense -- those examples of places where it doesn't work are great. I'm usually either on my local machine or SSHed into a relatively modern Linux machine and in both those cases it works well for me
John Timaeus
Cloud serial is connecting to a VM in AWS/GCP/Azure via the built-in console connection. Mouse doesn't even necessarily work over rdp to an xrdp endpoint running a terminal in gnome (where you expect it to). Honestly except for true local applications, I don't remember the last time mouse worked.
I do agree on the teaching point, examples are everything.
If I can't show you what I'm talking about while I'm talking about it, I probably won't talk about it. Students don't learn by listening to me...they learn by putting hands on keyboard and breaking things.
John Timaeus
I always mention that if you're lucky, some programs might support mouse. But you shouldn't make a habit of using a mouse in the terminal, because it likely won't be there when you need it. If you build a dependency on mouse in the terminal you're going to be SoL the first time you use a cloud serial console or run
docker -it exec <container> /bin/bash
Julia Evans
@johntimaeus what's a "cloud serial console"? i don't think i've run into a case where the mouse doesn't work in a place where I expected it to recently, though I'm sure they exist and I don't spend a lot of time sshed into Old Machines
Julia Evans
one thing I appreciate about mastodon/bluesky etc is that I can post examples and people will respond with different examples (or sometimes with confusion about the examples I chose) and it really helps me choose the right examples
Julia Evans
i think I'm so obsessed with examples because I find generalizing from examples much easier than finding specific examples given a general statement
so given the choice between “explain the big picture" and “give examples" I'll usually pick "give examples" if I have limited space/time. (though of course often you can do both)
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