Notices by Julia Evans (b0rk@social.jvns.ca), page 3

when I write tips I think a lot about how realistic the tip is for people to actually be able to implement in practice

For example in the terminal there are a lot of opportunities to say “well you could learn this cool keyboard shortcut if you want” but learning new keyboard shortcuts is really not easy (at least for me!)

Also it's tempting to say "well here's a configuration setting", but SO often those settings have unexpected consequences and I often feel like they're a waste of time

Also I think if you want to stop `Ctrl+S` from freezing your terminal, you can add `stty -ixon` to your .bashrc/.zshrc/etc

(I haven't personally tried this but I use fish which I believe effectively does the same thing by default and haven't run into any problems)

thanks for all the suggestions for how to break my terminal, here are the ones that have worked for me so far:

1. start a less capable shell (like dash), then `cat /usr/bin/vim` (screenshot included)
2. start `screen` and then `kill -9` it. Breaks my terminal in a way that can't be fixed with `reset`.
3. start `htop` in bash/zsh and then `kill -9` it. Causes using the mouse to print control characters. (doesn't break in fish though)
4. killing almost any TUI app in bash/zsh seems to break it

I'd love ideas for how to intentionally "break" my terminal so that one of these 4 things happen:

1. backspace doesn’t work, it prints ^H instead
2. terminal won't echo my characters when you type them
3. the line not breaking, and the terminal pasting new characters over old ones
4. overflowing the line, and when I backspace, the line is poorly redrawn

ideally I'd love steps that are:

a) specific
b) might (more or less) "realistically” happen while using the terminal normally
c) not Ctrl-S

apparently you can just download a public google spreadsheet as a CSV with curl (just tried it and it works!): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24255472/download-export-public-google-spreadsheet-as-tsv-from-command-line

I think the reason I love writing websites in Go so much is how simple it is to use, i can just `apt-get install golang-go` or whatever and everything just works, `go build` will give me a binary that I can immediately copy to a server and run in production if I want

I work on a lot of small projects and being able to spend ~0 time setting up my development environment is worth a lot to me

@PeterSommerlad please don't try to explain to me _why_ these things happen (I know why!) only potential solutions that have personally helped you

if the thing is not a problem for you, just ignore it :)

here's an experiment: i'd love some suggestions for solutions to these 13 problems about redirects in the terminal, but there are a lot of them!

so here is a google sheet where you can comment. please be nice. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XXfd5THrGEZ4AElwARMgk4j3BclbImdtWj90RO5Jktk/edit?usp=sharing

(you can also reply with solutions here if you'd prefer, or if google sheets doesn't let you comment for some reason!)

what problems have you run into with history in your shell? so far I have these, what am I missing?

- screwing up a command & getting that stuck in the history.
- history getting truncated (would love more details about why this happened to you! was it HISTSIZE? something else?)
- can't access history from other open terminals
- accidentally putting (or not putting!) a space at the beginning of a command

(please only problems related to history, and let me know which shell you're using!)

the terminal feels like kind of a weird thing to learn because

a) learning some of the "fundamentals" (like the roles of the terminal emulator / shell / operating system / libc / individual programs) is definitely pretty helpful
b) BUT I feel like ultimately I've needed to memorize solutions to a bunch of different problems, and understanding the “fundamentals" often doesn't help me figure out those solutions out on my own

@janl wait WHAT, TIL!

what are some problems you've run into with filenames in the terminal?

so far I have:

- operating on filenames that start with `-` is hard
- spaces in filenames
- accidentally creating files named with special shell characters (~, *, ?)
- maybe non-ASCII / emoji filenames? (would love specific examples)
- (on Mac OS) filenames with uppercase letters can get weird sometimes (would love specific examples!)

what am I missing? (only problems related to filenames please)

what are some problems you've run into in the terminal with folders? so far I have:

* accidentally putting 1 million files in a folder, so it's impossible / very slow to list
* you deleted a folder while you're still in it in the terminal, and everything gets weird
* something about symlinks (what?)

what am I missing? (only problems related to folders please!)

another terminal question: what problems have you run into with PATH? so far I have

- PATH lookups being cached by the shell (needing to rehash)
- how you need to restart the shell after updating PATH in your config file
- PATH ordering problems

what am i missing?

Just released a huge update to Mess With DNS (https://messwithdns.net) -- it looks the same, but now it's powered by a real DNS implementation on the backend (PowerDNS) and should be MUCH better at being standards compliant.

When we released Mess With DNS 3 years ago, the DNS implementation was pretty crappy and over the years I've gotten a lot of bug reports about it, so I’m very excited to replace my crappy implementation.

Would love to hear about any problems you run into!

the debugging manifesto poster I've been talking about is finally available for sale! You can get it here for $20: https://store.wizardzines.com/products/poster-debugging-manifesto

what some problems you've run into in the terminal with copy and paste? so far I have:

- pasting a URL with a `&` (or other character) in it without quotes
- pasting in many commands and one in the middle fails
- accidentally leaving in the '$'
- pasting in something with Fancy Quotes instead of normal quotes
- pasting a bash incantation into fish
- not knowing the keyboard shortcut to paste in a new terminal
- how Linux has two different clipboards

trying to make a list of specific problems that people run into in the terminal (and their solutions), what are some problems you've run into?

here are 8 I've come with so far

trying to figure out what the most common environment variables you come across in **interactive** shell use are

so far I have PATH, EDITOR, PS1, TERM, and maybe LD_LIBRARY_PATH/DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH

there's USER/PWD/HOME/SHELL/LANG but I feel like I never use those

what am I missing? (and what do you use that environment variable for?) I feel like IFS is more of a scripting thing

(from the replies: PAGER, maybe DISPLAY)

also a bunch of people commented in the thread about favourite terminal features that their favourite terminal emulator is one that has as few features as possible

if you're on team “as few terminal features as possible", I'd love to hear what problems "fancy" terminals generally cause for you (are they slower? something else?)