Some terminal hands

A few weeks ago I was running a terminal survey (you could Read the results here) and finally I asked:

What is the most disappointing thing about using the terminal for you?

1600 people responded, and I decided to spend a few days calculating all the answers. As I know classification of qualified data is not easy but I give it the best shot. I ended up building a custom
tool to make it faster to clap everything.

Like all my surveys the way no science is. I just posted the survey of Maghodon and Twitter, run it for days, and got the answers from anyone else to happen to see it and feel to answer.

Here are the lead categories of failures!

I think it’s worth thinking about while reading these comments

• 40% of people who respond to this survey use the terminal for 21+ years
• 95% of people who respond to the survey use the terminal for at least 4 years

These comments do not come from general beginners.

Here are the categories of failures! The number in brackets is the number of people with failure. I usually write this for myself because I try to write a zine about the terminal and I want to have a definition for what people are doing.

Syntax Recall (115)

People talk about struggles remembering:

• Syntax for cli tools such as awk, jq, sed, etc
• the syntax for redirects
• Keyboard shortcuts for TMUX, text edit, and so on

An example comment:

There are many small details “Trivia” to remember for full functionality. Even after all these years sometimes I can forget where it is 2 or 1 for the sposer, or forget where > and >>.

Terminals are difficult (91)

People talk about struggling in transit systems (for home-based / work computer instance or when sshing) and running:

• OS Differences in keyboard shortcuts (such as Linux vs Mac)
• systems without their preferred text editor (“no vim” or “vim ra”)))
• different versions of the same command (such as Mac OS Grep vs Gnu Greg)
• No Tab Completion
• A shell they are not used in (“the subtle differences between zsh and bash”)

As well as differences within the same system such as pagers not consistent with each other (git different from pagers).

An example comment:

I’m used to fish and vi modes that are not available if I ssh on servers, containers.

Color (85)

Many color problems, such as:

• Programs that set up colors that cannot be read in a light background color
• Find a color they want (and get it to work regularly with different apps)
• color not working within large layers of ssh / tmux / etc
• Defaults don’t like
• unwilling color to everyone and struggling to turn it

This comment felt relay to me:

Configuring my terminal theme in a reasonable way between the terminal emulator and fish (I did these years ago and remembered I was locked in my current theme because I was locking my current now configure too).

Keyboard Shortcuts (84)

Half of the comments of keyboard shortcuts about how Linux / Windows, keyboard shortcut to copy the terminal different from the rest of the OS.

Other issues with keyboard shortcuts other than copy / paste:

• USING Ctrl-W to a browser-based terminal and window closure
• The terminal only supports a limited set of keyboard shortcuts (no
  Ctrl-Shift-not Supernot Hypera lot of ctrl- Shortcuts cannot Ctrl-,)
• OS stops you from using a keyboard shortcut on terminal keyboard (such as default Mac OS used Ctrl+left arrow for something else)
• Issues with terminal emacs
• Backspace not working (2)

Other copy and paste issues (75)

Besides “keyboard shortcut for copy and paste different”, there are many other issues with copy and paste, such as:

• Copying SSH
• How TMUX and the terminal emulator both copy / paste in different ways
• Dealing with many different clipboards (System clipboard, VIM clipboard, “Middle Clicks” in Linux clipboard, etc.) and potentially synchronized them
• Added random copulation spaces from the terminal
• Multininine paste orders automatically run in a terrible way
• Want a way of copying the text without using the mouse

Blindness (55)

There are many comments about this, all falls on the same basic complaint – it’s hard to discover useful tools or parts! This clipping type of all is:

Tainting learning independently. Most of what I know is the increasing collection of things that random people tell me for many years.

RIGHT SUCCESS OF COURT (44)

More comments about this usually have a steep curvature of learning. A couple of examples commented:

After 15 years of use, I am not faster than using it than I am 5 or maybe even 10 years ago.

and

I know I can make my life easier by learning more about shortcuts and orders and terminal configurations but I don’t spend.

History (42)

Some History History Issues:

• History is not shared between Terminal tabs (16)
• Limits that are too short (4)
• History is not restored if terminal tabs are restored
• History is lost because the terminal is crushed
• Don’t know how to find history

An example comment:

Wasting a lot of time until I thought about it and I still suffered that “History” in Zsh had a small buffer; I need to type “History 0” to get any useful history length.

Bad documentation (37)

People talk about:

• The documentation is common opaque
• Lack of Examples of Pages Man
• Programs with no human page

Here’s a representative comment:

Find good examples and docs. Human pages are often insufficient, should overflow with stack

Scrollback (36)

Some Scrollback Issues:

• Programs publish multiple data that makes your Scrollback history
• Rebooting Terminal Weress Up to Scrollback
• Lack of timestamps
• GUI programs you start with the printing background at the point of view of other programs

An example comment:

If replace the terminal (specifically: making it more visible) leads to re-changing scrollback because orders formatted their output based on the terminal window width .

“Feeling It Endless” (33)

More comments about how the terminal feels restricted to hereditary decisions and how frequently users need to learn the details of implementation that feel very esoteric. An example comment:

Most heritage legacies, good to have a green implementation of the cli interface field.

Shell Scripting (32)

More complaints about Popix Shell Spript. There is a general feeling that scripting the shell is but also that a different less basic script language (Nushell, etc.) carries its own problems.

Shell script. My permission to rotate a script of shell and goes into a language language is relatively low. It’s so fun and powerful. Screw up can cost me not to worry.

Many issues

Few more issues mentioned at least 10 times:

• (31) Unspecified command line arguments: This -Ho helps or helps or-help?
• (24) Proceed to Dotfiles to sync with different systems
• (23) make (eg “my shell is too long to start”)
• .
• .
• (16) termin issues
• (16) Lack of image support (Saineel etc)
• (15) SSH issues (such as starting when the SSH connection is lost)
• (15) different TMUX / screen issues (eg lack integration between TMUX and the terminal emulator)
• (15) Type & Slow Type
• (13) The terminal wrapped for different reasons (maintenance Ctrl-S,, catin a binary, etc.)
• (12) Quotation / escape of the shell
• (11) different Windows / PowerShell issues

N / A (122)

There are also 122 answers to the “no” or “effects I can’t do everything in the terminal”

An example comment:

Imagine I found work for most / all failures

That’s all!

I don’t make a lot of comment on these results, but here is a couple of categories that feel related to me:

• Recall Syntax & History (usually the item you need to remember is something you’ve run before!)
• Being aware and the learning curve (the lack of scarring is certainly a big part of what makes learning difficult)
• “Transition systems are difficult” & “feel endless” (tools never changed in 30 or 40 years have a lot of problems but they’re always
  There Regardless of the system you maintain, very useful and stopped them at stop using)

Trying to calculate all these results in a reasonable way gives me an appreciation of social science science science.