terminal survey

Ruben Schade published a post with answers to the terminal survey that Julia Evans recently conducted.
Inspired by this, below are my answers to these questions.

How long have you been using the terminal?

Since 2002.

Which shells do you use?

zsh (on my laptop/workstation), bash (on servers).

Do you use your system’s default shell?

No and yes (was using zsh before macOS made it the default).

What OS do you use a Unix terminal on?

macOS, Linux.

What Terminal emulators do you use?

Terminal.app, GNOME Terminal.

Do you use a terminal-based editor?

Yes, vim.

Do you customise your terminal’s colour scheme?

Yes, my current scheme evolved from the 2003 Gentoo default scheme.

If your terminal get messed up, what do you do?

Run reset.

What terminal settings do you customise?

PATH, environment variables, alias, the prompt, custom functions, history, syntax-highlighting.

Do you use job control?

No. Tried it sporadically, but not really my thing, rather using a terminal multiplexer.

Do you manage your files using the terminal, or a GUI file manager?

Basic local operations mostly in the GUI. Anything advanced, automated, remote or mass-operations in the terminal.

Which of these environment variables have you set intentionally?

PATH, EDITOR, and some others:

% grep export zshrc/zshrc|sed -e 's/=.*//'
export GIT_AUTHOR_NAME
export GIT_COMMITTER_NAME
export TZ
export PERL5LIB
export GOPATH
export LOCKPRG
export SAM_CLI_TELEMETRY
export JAVA_HOME
export RSYNC_RSH
export CVS_RSH
export EDITOR
export USE_EDITOR
export CVSEDITOR
export BROWSER
export LESS
export HOMEBREW_NO_ANALYTICS
export WWW_BROWSER
Do you use vi mode in your shell?

Yes.

How do you navigate files in less?

/ to search, then mostly spacebar to scroll and the occasional j/k.

How do you use pipes?

sort, uniq, tr, sed, find with xargs to parallelise, and awk.

Do you use a terminal multiplexer?

screen (still trying to migrate to tmux, eventually).

What’s the most frustrating thing about using the terminal for you?

Scripts assuming GNU specific parameters/tools on macOS.

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