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

did a read through of the terminal zine draft today and it still needs to go through a round of beta readers but I'm feeling so good about how it's going!

you can sign up here to get an email when it comes out: https://wizardzines.com/zine-announcements/

@thisismissem sometimes I think i’m going to regret using a custom domain for email, like it’s great now but keeping it registered for the rest of my life is a nontrivial project and I can imagine it going wrong

@Xavier I thought `source blah.sh` was the same as `source ./blah.sh`!

every core unix command I use

i can tell I've been writing this terminal zine for too long because I just had the thought "oh, it might be fun to read `man bash`”

I am learning some upsetting-to-me things from reading the bash man page, for example that in bash `source blah.sh` will by default search all directories in your PATH for a file called `blah.sh`

@ripienaar the man page claims source is just a synonym for `.`

I think a lot about how information about how computers work often seems to get passed down in an "oral history" kind of way

like how “the terminal” works is sort of documented, but it's made of so many components that the documentation is split across a million different documents

and some parts of "how the terminal works" are just broad conventions which aren't documented anywhere I know of (like “TUI programs like `top` or `less` will probably quit if you press `q`)

slowly working on a mega terminal cheat sheet

here's a link to the draft as a PDF: https://jvns.ca/terminal-cheat-sheet-draft.pdf

canonical mode

the terminal: cast of characters

got a lot of great answers to "how is the shell involved in handling Ctrl+C" to the effect of one of:

- "the shell is responsible for sending a SIGINT"
- "the shell takes input from the terminal emulator and relays it to the program"
- "it must be handled by the layer above the program, which is the shell"

and while none of those is true, they feel like they totally _could_ be true in a different world. It feels hard to explain why it might be useful to have a more "accurate" mental model

follow up: for folks who replied to "who's in charge of making Ctrl+C work in the terminal" with "the shell”, why did you say that?

I'm much more interested in answers that you're not 100% sure about than "right" answers

(also please don't correct people who say something you think is "wrong”)

(2/?)

@anthk do you ever do that in practice?

one thing I've learned about teaching over the years is that if I make a negative statement (like “git commits aren't stored as diffs"), it doesn't really work -- often people will just ignore it, especially if it contradicts their current mental model

so I always have to figure out how to make a positive statement, and make it in a way that will convince people whose mental model is different right now

convincing people to adjust their mental models is really hard!

we've been looking into shipping zines to Europe from an the EU instead of from the US and I think it might be possible! Still need to figure out all the details (and it still might not work out for various reasons) but fingers crossed.

@wollman oh interesting, I thought the point of the line editing stuff was to make it faster (and do it locally on the terminal) but I guess that's not true!

I've been thinking about the "terminal driver" and I realized I'm kind of confused it. my understanding is that the terminal driver is responsible for (among others):

1. basic line editing (when the tty is in cooked mode)
2. translating bytes (like `\x03` for Ctrl+C) into signals (like SIGINT)

but in the 1980s when the "terminal" and the "mainframe" were separate machines, #1 would presumably happen on the terminal, and #2 on the mainframe

but now they're both handled in the same place?

just got this new “Love Your Bugs" sticker in the mail! Anyone who buys a print copy of “The Pocket Guide to Debugging" will get this free sticker with it

https://wizardzines.com/zines/debugging-guide/

(you can also get just the sticker here if you want https://store.wizardzines.com/products/love-your-bugs-sticker)

i tried nix for the first time 2 years ago and I've given up on using it as a package manager locally (I just went back to homebrew), but I'm still using NixOS. Even though it's very confusing it still feels like the easiest way for me to manage a server