What's involved in getting a "modern" terminal setup?

Recently I’ve been thinking about how everything that happens in the terminal is some combination of: Your operating system’s job Your shell’s job Your terminal emulator’s job The job of whatever program you happen to be running (like top or vim or cat) The first three (your operating system, shell, and terminal) are all kind of known quantities...

Here’s a niche terminal problem that has bothered me for years but that I never really understood until a few weeks ago. Let’s say you’re running this command to watch for some specific output in a log file: tail -f /some/log/file | grep thing1 | grep thing2 If log lines are being added to the file relatively slowly, the result I’d see is…...

I like writing Javascript without a build system and for the millionth time yesterday I ran into a problem where I needed to figure out how to import a Javascript library in my code without using a build system, and it took FOREVER to figure out how to import it because the library’s setup instructions assume that you’re using a build system....

I added a new section to this site a couple weeks ago called TIL (“today I learned”). the goal: save interesting tools & facts I posted on social media One kind of thing I like to post on Mastodon/Bluesky is “hey, here’s a cool thing”, like the great SQLite repl litecli, or the fact that cross compiling in Go Just Works and it’s amazing, or...

Hello! I’ve been thinking about the terminal a lot and yesterday I got curious about all these “control codes”, like Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-W, etc. What’s the deal with all of them? a table of ASCII control characters Here’s a table of all 33 ASCII control characters, and what they do on my machine (on Mac OS), more or less. There are about a...