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 occasionalj
/k
. - How do you use pipes?
-
sort
,uniq
,tr
,sed
,find
withxargs
to parallelise, andawk
. - Do you use a terminal multiplexer?
-
screen
(still trying to migrate totmux
, eventually). - What’s the most frustrating thing about using the terminal for you?
-
Scripts assuming GNU specific parameters/tools on macOS.