Entering text in the terminal is complicated

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...

I’ve been having problems for the last 3 years or so where Mess With DNS periodically runs out of memory and gets OOM killed. This hasn’t been a big priority for me: usually it just goes down for a few minutes while it restarts, and it only happens once a day at most, so I’ve just been ignoring. But last week it started actually causing a problem...

Warning: this is a post about very boring yakshaving, probably only of interest to people who are trying to upgrade Hugo from a very old version to a new version. But what are blogs for if not documenting one’s very boring yakshaves from time to time? So yesterday I decided to try to upgrade Hugo. There’s no real reason to do this – I’ve been...

Yesterday I was thinking about how long it took me to get a colorscheme in my terminal that I was mostly happy with (SO MANY YEARS), and it made me wonder what about terminal colours made it so hard. So I asked people on Mastodon what problems they’ve run into with colours in the terminal, and I got a ton of interesting responses! Let’s talk...