Notices by Julia Evans (b0rk@social.jvns.ca)

@cwebber haha I love this and the feeling of "wow this person is telling me about something cool but I absolutely cannot process it right now" is so relatively

@xabean just read the latest in the Goblin Emperor series by Katherine Addison. I liked it a lot.

@molly0xfff haha last time I bought one of these I ended up with a crappy one that kept dropping the device on my face but this motivates me to try again

I was reading some reasons people find the terminal frustrating today and “you can't click to move the cursor" is a really interesting one

because technically your shell COULD move the cursor when you click (by turning on mouse reporting, like you can in vim), but turning on mouse reporting makes it much harder to copy text (it means you need to shift+click, and also it will do weird things around handle line breaks/spaces)

explaining why this doesn't work feels pretty unsatisfying though

what's involved in getting a "modern" terminal setup? https://jvns.ca/blog/2025/01/11/getting-a-modern-terminal-setup/

it's a new year and I spent my first workday writing a quick ★ terminal survey ★!

it should take about 5 minutes and I'd love for folks to fill it out, my goal is to understand who we're writing the terminal zine for a little better https://s.surveyplanet.com/iiyhswqo

@simon just wanted to say I really appreciate your LLM posts, your notes about Artifacts especially

really enjoyed this paper by Kendall Makai and Philip Guo on the process of building an unofficial guide for undergrads by undergrads https://pg.ucsd.edu/publications/hidden-curriculum-undergrad-mentoring_ICER-2023.pdf

more here: https://kendallnakai.com/portfolio/hidden-curriculum.html

@ramsey @janl i'm not sure I'll ever understand the "it was so easy to develop with PHP + FTP" thing, it kind of feels like you had to be there

(it sounds hard to me, like developing with no version control?? no push to deploy? no local dev environment?)

@ramsey @janl absolutely not trying to criticize! just a bit surprised to hear it described as "easy" :)

I don't know if it's possible to get a good answer to this but: if you learned how to make websites with, like, users who can login and do things where the website stores stuff in a database, without doing it as a job, how did you do it?

I feel like in principle I know all of the basic pieces (HTTP, HTML, CSS, SQL, CORS, CSRF, various programming languages, etc), but also somehow it still feels extremely hard to me

@mjd i've heard of it (maybe bash has it too?) but it's not clear to me if people actually use it in practice

@zkat some things i can think of:

- controller conventions? like on my steam deck I think “b" often means "go back"
- the idea of like learning an enemy’s "patterns" so that you can predict what they're going to do
- i feel like there are a bunch of melee vs ranged weapon conventions, like how melee weapons hit harder but then you need to be closer to the enemies

sometimes i think i could replace myself with a bot that replies to “you can use X terminal feature for that” with “do you use X? do you find it works well for you?”

i’m always perplexed when someone says “you can use X” and then they reply to “do you use it?” with “oh no very rarely, it doesn’t work well for me in practice because XYZ”

writing about the terminal is so funny because it's like "redirects are so useful! hooray!"

"okay and also `cmd file.txt > file.txt` will just permanently delete the contents of the `file.txt`”

lots of cool useful tools with the occasionally horrifying fact that you just need to keep seared into your memory

(please do not explain to me why this happens)

before we had graphical terminals with a mouse, was there just.. no way to copy and paste between different terminal programs? for example if you wanted to take something a program printed out and pass it as an argument to another program, what would you do?

was it "use some combination of redirects, pipes, $(), tab completion, !!, etc to make it work"? did people just retype things a lot? maybe `screen` helped?

feels like being able to just copy and paste makes a lot of things so much easier.

@crenfrow i love the idea of fd in theory but I think the fact that its syntax is different from `find`'s means that I'm never actually going to use it in practice (by the time I think about using fd I've already typed out the find command haha)

I just learned that globbing in fish (and maybe zsh too) is WAY more powerful than I realized, like:

- instead of `find . -name '*.md'` I can just do `ls **.md`
- instead of `find . -type d -name ‘*blah*’`, I can just `ls -d **blah*/`

"rules" that terminal programs follow https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/11/26/terminal-rules/

@simontatham I should learn what VISUAL does