The Valuable Dev - A Guide to the Terminal, Console, and Shell
Tuesday Greetings, Valuable Developer!
Even if it’s a bit late, I wish you a merry Christmas if you celebrate it! My best wishes in any case, for the present and the future.
Following my article about ZLE (the Zsh Line Editor), a couple of readers were keen to have another article exploring the terminal in depth. This is exactly the subject of this month’s article.
I spent a lot of time researching and writing it; there are many different (and conflicting) sources about the subject, and it took time to find out what’s the most accurate.
I’m thinking writing a similar article about the shell itself, but only if enough readers are interested; so, if you are, don’t hesitate to hit this “reply” button to let me know.
A Guide to the Terminal, Console, and Shell
The terminal is the result of its long history, from the teleprinter to the terminal emulator. Let’s look at its evolution to better understand how it works. We’ll also clarify, in the process, the differences between a terminal, a console, a terminal emulator, and the shell.
Updates
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I’ve published the last article in my series about how and why I’ve written my book Building Your Mouseless Development Environment.
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I didn’t abandon my YouTube channel, I just lack time to make new videos. I hope it will get better next month: I’ve two new videos in the making, and I hope they’ll be out before the end of January.
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Most of my free time is going into writing the book Learning to Play Vim.
Resources
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Practical Creativity is a talk done at the GDC (Game Development Conference) about creativity. It’s not only for game developers, but for everybody interested in creativity in general.
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I found the podcast episode treating devs like human beings interesting and quite aligned with some ideas I pushed forward in The Valuable Dev. It’s mostly about engineering managers, but it can be interesting for every developer out there.
Mouseless
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The CLI jqp can help you navigate through JSON in a more visual and intuitive way, using jq under the hood.
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jid is another alternative to jq with autocompletion and other visual help.
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Thanks to up (the Ultimate Plumber), you’ll get an interactive and visual way to create your shell one-liners full of pipes.
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Zellij is a customizable terminal multiplexer (similar to tmux) thanks to a powerful plugin system.
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What about versioning parts of your filesystem, to be able to restore files from the past? httm answers this specific need.
Let’s Connect
If you want more information about the content of this newsletter, or if you have any question, don’t hesitate to reply to this email! I’m always happy to answer back.
Similarly, if you think this newsletter is boring, if you didn’t like my last article, or if you have any other feedback, please let me know; it would help a ton.
Many thanks for your interest in my work, and, if it’s indeed a new year for you: happy new year!
See you in a month,
Matthieu