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

copy and paste in the terminal

terminal programs have a lot of hidden rules

how terminal colours work

TIL you can configure ssh to only allow a client to run 1 specific command https://dan.langille.org/2025/04/17/using-ssh-authorized-keys-to-decide-what-the-incoming-connection-can-do/

current status: putting a few weird terminal facts that I do not have any practical use for into the terminal zine

(mostly I’m keeping it extremely practical but I think it's fun to have SOME weird stuff)

anyway a much more practical use of stty is to disable `Ctrl+S`

@cwebber this is amazing but also I do legitimately have a hard time reading your site on mobile without reader mode

adding a "<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1”>” seems to really help (like this: https://superb-piroshki-90aee2.netlify.app/)

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”)

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