Julia Evans
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New zine: The Secret Rules of the Terminal
Hello! After many months of writing deep dive blog posts about the terminal, on Tuesday I released a new zine called “The Secret Rules of the Terminal”! You can get it for $12 here: https://wizardzines.com/zines/terminal, or get an 15-pack of all my zines here. Here’s the cover: the table of contents…
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Using `make` to compile C programs (for non-C-programmers)
I have never been a C programmer but every so often I need to compile a C/C++ program from source. This has been kind of a struggle for me: for a long time, my approach was basically “install the dependencies, run make, if it doesn’t work, either try to find a binary someone has compiled or give up”…
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Standards for ANSI escape codes
Hello! Today I want to talk about ANSI escape codes. For a long time I was vaguely aware of ANSI escape codes (“that’s how you make text red in the terminal and stuff”) but I had no real understanding of where they were supposed to be defined or whether or not there were standards for them. I just had…
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How to add a directory to your PATH
I was talking to a friend about how to add a directory to your PATH today. It’s something that feels “obvious” to me since I’ve been using the terminal for a long time, but when I searched for instructions for how to do it, I actually couldn’t find something that explained all of the steps – a lot of…
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Some terminal frustrations
A few weeks ago I ran a terminal survey (you can read the results here) and at the end I asked: What’s the most frustrating thing about using the terminal for you? 1600 people answered, and I decided to spend a few days categorizing all the responses. Along the way I learned that classifying qualitative…
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What's involved in getting a "modern" terminal setup?
Hello! Recently I ran a terminal survey and I asked people what frustrated them. One person commented: There are so many pieces to having a modern terminal experience. I wish it all came out of the box. My immediate reaction was “oh, getting a modern terminal experience isn’t that hard, you just need…
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"Rules" that terminal programs follow
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,…
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Why pipes sometimes get "stuck": buffering
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…
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Importing a frontend Javascript library without a build system
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…
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New microblog with TILs
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…
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ASCII control characters in my terminal
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…
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Using less memory to look up IP addresses in Mess With DNS
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…
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Some notes on upgrading Hugo
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…
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Terminal colours are tricky
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…
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Some Go web dev notes
I spent a lot of time in the past couple of weeks working on a website in Go that may or may not ever see the light of day, but I learned a couple of things along the way I wanted to write down. Here they are: go 1.22 now has better routing I’ve never felt motivated to learn any of the Go routing libraries…
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Reasons I still love the fish shell
I wrote about how much I love fish in this blog post from 2017 and, 7 years of using it every day later, I’ve found even more reasons to love it. So I thought I’d write a new post with both the old reasons I loved it and some reasons. This came up today because I was trying to figure out why my terminal…
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Migrating Mess With DNS to use PowerDNS
About 3 years ago, I announced Mess With DNS in this blog post, a playground where you can learn how DNS works by messing around and creating records. I wasn’t very careful with the DNS implementation though (to quote the release blog post: “following the DNS RFCs? not exactly”), and people started reporting…
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Go structs are copied on assignment (and other things about Go I'd missed)
I’ve been writing Go pretty casually for years – the backends for all of my playgrounds (nginx, dns, memory, more DNS) are written in Go, but many of those projects are just a few hundred lines and I don’t come back to those codebases much. I thought I more or less understood the basics of the language…
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Entering text in the terminal is complicated
The other day I asked what folks on Mastodon find confusing about working in the terminal, and one thing that stood out to me was “editing a command you already typed in”. This really resonated with me: even though entering some text and editing it is a very “basic” task, it took me maybe 15 years of…
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Reasons to use your shell's job control
Hello! Today someone on Mastodon asked about job control (fg, bg, Ctrl+z, wait, etc). It made me think about how I don’t use my shell’s job control interactively very often: usually I prefer to just open a new terminal tab if I want to run multiple terminal programs, or use tmux if it’s over ssh. But…
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