[HN Gopher] Some Terminal Frustrations
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Some Terminal Frustrations
Author : aragilar
Score : 18 points
Date : 2025-02-06 06:59 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (jvns.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (jvns.ca)
| gregjor wrote:
| A good catalog of mostly skills issues.
|
| Many of the points raised point to real glitches, cruft, and
| frustrations with using the CLI. Those get more frustrating for
| people who only occasionally use the CLI, and less so for those
| of us who live in the shell.
|
| Many of the same kinds of problems exist in GUIs. I rarely use
| Windows so when I do I can't find or discover what I need.
|
| Over time you remember the commands and flags, write aliases, set
| up config files, and mostly it becomes second nature.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| This comment is a good distillation of my frustration with Unix
| ideologues. Unix and the CLI can never fail, they can only be
| failed; any possible unhappiness is a "skill issue"; it's
| _your_ job to memorize a thousand arcane and badly-systematized
| program names and flags, created in an era of RAM and disk
| space limitations which have no relevance today, etc. And going
| "many of the same problems exist in GUIs" is a "no u" tier of
| response.
| skydhash wrote:
| Do you expect to go inside a plane and fly it with no
| training? Or pick up a violin and play a sonata? The terminal
| have its flaws, but all other interactions models have their
| own. But when people don't try to learn the basic tenet and
| just ask why it can't be like
| $other_system_they've_learned_first, you bet that they're
| going to point you to the manual.
| fragmede wrote:
| I expect that pilots are allowed to have opinions about
| systems in the plane as being user unfriendly, like MCAS of
| 737 Max fame. I expect violinists to be allowed to complain
| when their bow is rosined wrong. Sure, we should expect
| users to at least read parts of the manual, but when
| billions of dollars have been spent so I can ask the
| computer to write me an ffmpeg invocation, haven't you got
| to ask to yourself that there's a chance we're making this
| unnecessary hard on ourselves for no reason?
| atoav wrote:
| If I could change two things about terminals it was thesd:
| 1. Make text editable with a cursor and mouse selection like in
| any other modern text application 2. Make use of the
| normal and expected text shortcuts for copy, cut, paste, select
| all etc. Make ESC *escape* the current program.
|
| And I am a heavy terminal user who has no issues with how it
| currently is, but I also have to teach these things...
|
| I am aware that such a change would probably be 1000 times more
| complex to pull off than most people would think, but every time
| I have to explain to beginners they can't edit the text I die a
| little inside.
| skydhash wrote:
| The use of a terminal is to communicate with an application
| (the shell mostly, and other REPL software). The text shown is
| a log of that interaction, not the interaction itself. We could
| probably design a better interaction model (smalltalk, plan9)
| but the current one is the most simple.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Previously:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42970632
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42975816
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42959824
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42953869
| tonymet wrote:
| Is this a bot?
| fragmede wrote:
| does it matter if it is?
| tonymet wrote:
| I encourage users to log context switches and then find tools to
| address the context switch. Try to stay in your terminal whenever
| possible .
|
| For documentation context switches (e.g. stackexchange/googling)
| : install tldr, fabric , devdocs, sdk docs etc . And get
| comfortable searching man pages with "/" and man -K
|
| For job/task context switching (e.g. running multiple jobs like a
| transfer job and a measure-status job), get familiar with bash
| job control or tmux
|
| For history context switching (e.g. re-running an old command) ,
| set a long history like HISTFILESIZE=100000 and use ctrl-r. If
| you ever run out of history, make it bigger . Also dump helpful
| commands into a README.md with echo COMMAND ARG1 ARG2... >>
| README.md . Fzf is also helpful.
|
| For context-switches stemming from missing settings / dot files,
| set up "dotfiles bare git repo". You can push this repo around
| with SSH, so every fresh machine will have your settings on first
| login.
|
| The challenges in her survey are common, and I wish shells did
| better user onboarding and tutorials, the way games and consumer
| apps do. But each one can be addressed with the right
| preparation.
| staindk wrote:
| Some good points made in the article.
|
| If you use the terminal for any appreciable amount of time I
| heavily suggest getting fzf (even if just for the search).
|
| Tmux is great if you need any more than 1 terminal window open at
| once - just remap some of its hotkeys to stuff that make more
| sense for you (e.g. I use "Alt + |" to split vertically and "Alt
| + -" (minus) to split horizontally).
|
| Man pages are generally about 500 times longer than I need them
| to be (just help me do a basic curl/SSH copy/... please) - so I
| have cheat.sh aliased which helps a lot with simple "how do I use
| X".
|
| Aliases in general are insanely useful. If you're a fzf search
| whiz they may not help you as much but seeing people type common
| commands out multiple times a day... makes me happy knowing I
| have my alias bank.
| kalaksi wrote:
| I can relate to many of the frustrations. As years have passed,
| I've been trying to lessen the (repetitive) effort required for
| basic monitoring and maintenance over plain SSH. I felt that just
| the shell wasn't good enough, and large software stacks just
| increase maintenance burden.
|
| Ended up creating a GUI app called Lightkeeper
| (https://github.com/kalaksi/lightkeeper). Works over SSH,
| requires no daemons and is configurable. Still working on some
| unfinished features.
| UltraSane wrote:
| "Most of the legacy cruft, it would be great to have a green
| field implementation of the CLI interface."
|
| This is very true.
| tonymet wrote:
| Check out powershell
| oliviergg wrote:
| Atuin.sh solved all my problems with history: history by project
| : check, history by session :check, global history: check. And if
| you want you can share history between computers. I just have to
| enter 2-4 letters and I can found complex command to rerun or to
| reuse as example.
| terminaltrove wrote:
| > discoverability (55) There were lots of comments about this,
| which all came down to the same basic complaint - it's hard to
| discover useful tools or features! This comment kind of summed it
| all up:
|
| > How difficult it is to learn independently. Most of what I know
| is an assorted collection of stuff I've been told by random
| people over the years.
|
| This is all too true, the discoverability aspect is one of the
| reasons why we exist (0), and there is lots to improve here for
| discovering terminal tools, how to install and use them.
|
| Also thanks for running this survey Julia.
|
| Also, let us know on what we can improve on the site if you find
| Terminal Trove useful for you.
|
| (0) https://terminaltrove.com/
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