I am curious what terminal people use on Windows. I find MSYS to be very good, since it lets me work just as I would on Linux with Emacs-style editing.
I use cygwin with screen (no tmux on windows sadly), vim, and a smattering of grep/sed/awk/etc.
Love Your Terminal
21–30 of 137 posts
Re: Love Your Terminal
#22This is more of a git tip... but you should probably change your "ggpnp" alias to use "pull --rebase" instead of "pull" to avoid an unnecessary merge commit in your history.
Re: Love Your Terminal
#23Cool guide. For beginners I'd also suggest restraint with your dotfiles. It's easy to rush into installing oh-my-zsh and using vim with every plugin you can find, but I found that made for a really confusing learning experience, especially if your config ever breaks.
That's actually why I stopped tweaking things to hell and back, losing my config's was too painful. I usually just go for basic colour tweaks these days. It also makes me more portable and productive when I am using a new or someone else's machine.
> losing my config's was too painful.
How do you lose your configs? Store them in github/dropbox and sync.
> It also makes me more portable and productive when I am using a new or someone else's machine.
With dedicated work and personal laptops, using a new or someone else's machine isn't a commonly occurring event. I would rather optimize for what I have 99% of the time.
Re: Love Your Terminal
#24Cool guide. For beginners I'd also suggest restraint with your dotfiles. It's easy to rush into installing oh-my-zsh and using vim with every plugin you can find, but I found that made for a really confusing learning experience, especially if your config ever breaks.
That's actually why I stopped tweaking things to hell and back, losing my config's was too painful. I usually just go for basic colour tweaks these days. It also makes me more portable and productive when I am using a new or someone else's machine.
I used to take this approach. One day I found I had no choice but to remap CapsLock as a second Ctrl key because my little finger was in constant agony otherwise.
I've never had a second's trouble from the finger since then, but you should see me try to type on other peoples' computers now. I TEND TO WRITE IN ALL-CAPS A LOT BY ACCIDENT!
So for me there's no longer much point in caring about portability, and I have aliases and keyboard shortcuts and fancy PS1s to spare.
Re: Love Your Terminal
#25use tmux for multiple screens and ditch that xorg garbage.
I don't understand why I'd want to use tmux locally. I'm a huge believer in tmux on remote machines though. Why would I want to use it on my local laptop?
Say I am working on a rails project. I need vim open with root; I need rails server, console, dbconsole; I need one window at project root for misc task; and I prefer not to navigate with the mouse to different tabs. Personally, I vastly prefer tmux terminal multiplexing over terminal tabs.
Also, it doesn't happen frequently, but I have closed terminals which I didn't mean to. tmux/screen means that causes only minor inconvenience, compared to closing the terminal, opening it again, opening all tabs, dealing with swap files, re-running servers, dbconsoles etc.
Re: Love Your Terminal
#26In my scenario, I have to work on several tabs and splits for one topic/work (say it's Python work), and I usually have 2-3 topics in a day (office related, playing around, and maybe side-project stuff). I'm using tmux, and I tend to have 2-3 tabs for each topic, using only tmux to manage them is painful and ugly: there's too many tabs in the current display, and the default gnome terminal doesn't mix with the looks…
> using only tmux to manage them is painful and ugly:
How is using tmux to manage them is painful?
Re: Love Your Terminal
#27If you're using git, I suggest fixing up your prompts so it doesn't display the sign for Mercury when in a git repo.
So much junk in a prompt... I clicked on the link to Steve Losh's page and had a heck of a time figuring out what commands he had actually typed.
The bash defaults are pretty reasonable: show your working directory, maybe your username, and a $ to end the prompt. If you're root, you get a # instead. It stays out of the way; if you want to get fancy, colorize it so lines you entered stand out. These days, I even turn off ls's colorizing half the time; then again, I always thought wibbley-wobbley 3d windows with glowing buttons were a little silly compared to, say, FVWM or i3.
Re: Love Your Terminal
#28use tmux for multiple screens and ditch that xorg garbage.
> use tmux for multiple screens and ditch that xorg garbage.
tmux for multiple screens instead of Xorg garbage? I think you don't know what Xorg is.
That doesn't make any sense. If you are referring to the screenshot, that's gnome-terminal's tabs.
Re: Love Your Terminal
#29Whatever the terminal you are using, configure it so that it doesn't eat your alt/ctrl key and then learn readline bindings.
Re: Love Your Terminal
#30Yet another article proclaiming bash as garbage and zsh as the best thing since sliced bread.
I used bash for years, I was just forced into zsh at work and loved it. Bash is fine, but I didn't know any of its intricacies. I'm not saying don't use bash. I'm saying don't use bash without learning about how to make it work for you (and probably trying other things).
Bash is ugly and horrible but I know it well and have bad Stockholm syndrome so it's too late.