Notices by Julia Evans (b0rk@social.jvns.ca), page 4

did some buffering tests in 10 languages where I wrote the equivalent of this program and then ran the program with `./program | grep hello`

```
while True:
print("hello")
sleep(1)
```

In 4 of the languages (Python, Ruby, C, Perl) nothing at at all gets printed (because they buffer the output)

in the others (Go, C++, JS, Rust, Java, Lua, bash) you see "hello" printed out once per second

code: https://github.com/jvns/buffer-stdout-tests

I guess the point is that figuring out how to reproduce a problem in a simple way is not easy at all, but getting good at doing that makes it WAY easier to report issues to an open source project in a useful way

this does seem obvious in retrospect

i think it was not obvious to me when I was a baby aspiring open source contributor that a big reason I was struggling was that there were a lot of software development skills that I just didn't have yet

it was a lot easier for me to build those skills in the context of a job where I had coworkers who could help me, and then very occasionally use them in open source projects later

(of course people can and do learn those skills in open source, but that wasn't my path)

even though I'm never going to be a big "open source contributor” it's fun to notice that at some point in the last 15 years I have learned how to write fairly clear github issues and the very occasional pull request that gets merged

(this post is brought to you by the 3 tiny pull requests and 6 issues that I created this year. 3 of the issues got fixed!)

in case you missed it, I’m doing a big zine sale on Friday!

you can put it in google calendar if you’d like a reminder: https://wzrd.page/cal (or ical: https://wzrd.page/cal.ics)

another funny example of a "social rule" in the terminal is that it's not actually considered THAT rude for a program to not support arrow keys, like if the program only takes very limited interactive input (like just `y`/`n` or entering a number), then it's normal for the arrow keys to not work. Git is an example of this.

i forgot to put “please don’t explain how terminal keybindings work to me” on this thread and i’m regretting it, anyway, please don’t, i wrote 4000 words about it if anyone wants a deep dive
https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/10/31/ascii-control-characters/

https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/07/08/readline/

I haven't totally sold myself yet on this "what are the secret rules of the terminal?” framing but it feels like a reasonable way to talk about how, even though “the terminal” is a lot of separate things working together, it "feels" like a cohesive environment that has a lot of rules that you can generally expect to be true.

Some of those rules are Unchangeable Facts and some of them are just Vague Social Rules but understanding the vague social rules is just as important as knowing The Facts.

an example of a "social rule" in the terminal is that if you have a noninteractive program, you can generally expect that `Ctrl-C` will stop it, programs can do whatever they want but it would just be kind of rude for a noninteractive program to not respect `Ctrl-C`

(there are different and more complicated social expectations around how to quit interactive programs)

another example of a "social rule" is that at an interactive prompt you should expect `Ctrl-W` to delete the last word, this is weird because depending on the _kind_ of program, the exact mechanism for how `Ctrl-W` will delete the last word might change, but I think it would be generally considered rude if a program with an interactive prompt treated `Ctrl-W` in a different way

(text editors are an exception though and generally are allowed to handle text editing however they please)

another social rule is that if a program is writing its stdout to a file or pipe, it's expected to turn off colour codes so that users don't end up looking at output like this:

ESC[1;33massets.jsESC[0m

(as far as I know there is almost nothing enforcing this behaviour except that users will be unhappy if you don't do it)

every so often I get confused because I'm writing a zine about the terminal and didn't I already write 4 zines about the terminal???

but I've never written about what the UI “rules” you need to know to use the terminal interactively are, only:

- notes on core Unix concepts — file descriptors, signals, etc (Bite Size Linux)
- shell scripting (Bite Size Bash)
- cheat sheets for sed/grep/xargs/etc (Bite Size Command Line)
- cheat sheets for command line networking tools (Bite Size Networking)

has anyone built a tool for indexing and searching your own Mastodon posts? some notes:

a) I mostly just want to search my own posts, maybe also people's replies to me
b) I'm aware of (and sometimes use) mastodon's elasticsearch support, but it only returns 40 results at a time and I'd like to be able to get all results instantly
c) imagining something that uses SQLite full text search or something
d) might also extend it to index / search my other social media posts

I find the 2>&1 shell redirect syntax is really weird because

a) on one hand, it does feel like it should be possible to think about how it works, `dup`, read it left to right, file descriptors, imagine how it's implemented in the shell, we can understand computers etc etc
b) in practice my brain completely rejects this information and can only handle "try one way and it doesn't work try the other way”

(not especially looking for explanations of how it works right now)

working on this unix redirects diagram today

I love this protest game for Toronto bike lanes by @omarieclaire so much, having a lot of fun dying repeatedly

play here: https://marieflanagan.com/loserlane/

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