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

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)

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

@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

@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

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

importing a frontend Javascript library without a build system https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/11/18/how-to-import-a-javascript-library/

just noticed that How Git Works has sold FOUR THOUSAND copies since it came out in June?? https://wizardzines.com/zines/git

folder gotchas

https://wizardzines.com/comics/folder-gotchas/

(describing readline keybindings as "those weird keyboard shortcuts from emacs" and libedit as "like readline but worse" is maybe questionable but that is how I feel about them)

more weird terminal stuff: line editing

what are some problems you've run into related to **config files** in the terminal? the main one I can think of is how bash has like 5 different config files it might potentially use but I feel like there are more

Yesterday a program made my terminal’s cursor disappear! I was really surprised because programs so rarely mess up my terminal these days. (fish prevents almost all problems like this)

the problem was that it printed out "\033[?25l" to make the cursor invisible without printing out a corresponding "\033[?25h” to make it visible again

like most "my terminal is broken" problems you can fix this by running `reset` but it was VERY disorienting until I realized what had happened

screenshots:

me: “I know Python! I've been using it on and off for like 15 years!”

also me: <still has no real idea what `setup.py` does>

(not looking for someone to explain it to me thanks)

trying to think of some examples of terminal programs where the mouse works -- so far I have vim, tmux, htop, less... where else does it work well?

this post is brought to you by me reading an intro to some confusing programming concept and getting mad because it didn't explain that (in my opinion) the confusing language feature is kind of a bad choice by the language designers and that if possible it's easier to just avoid using it instead of remembering how it works

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when I'm explaining something weird about computers I always try to think about if the Weird Thing is really worth the real estate it takes up in your brain or not

I feel like half of programming is remembering how weird stuff works and the other half is setting things up so that you do not have to remember the weird stuff

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

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?

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pipes & redirects cheat sheet