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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • Seconding vim as the universal Unix/Linux editor. It takes a while to become a real vim pro, but learning basic usage is very helpful. Escape to switch to normal mode (where letters trigger functions instead of just typing), i to switch to input mode, : in normal mode to enter commands, :wq to save and quit, :q! to exit without saving - that alone should be enough to cover a lot of basic use cases. If you ever want to learn more, there are plenty of tutorials online.


  • I don’t know about Mac, but on Windows the Mullvad app doesn’t auto update. If you want to do it Windows style you can look for deb files (which are like installers) or AppImages (which are like standalone executables).

    Most pieces of software give terminal instructions for Linux because different people might use different package manager frontends, but literally every Linux user has a terminal. It might seem daunting at first, but giving users commands to run in their terminal is a lot more simple than trying to walk them through repo management through the GUI, or just telling them to figure it out themselves.






  • man is standard Unix manual pages, while info is a documentation format introduced/popularised by GNU. info pages usually have a lot more information (sometimes including tutorials, guided examples, links to different pages and sections, etc (depending on the project maintainer obviously)) but man pages are the standard and basically everything has one. If you run info [program] for something without a dedicated info page, it will show the man page instead.







  • tmux (and GNU screen, its older predecessor) is a terminal multiplexer, which is a fancy phrase used to describe turning one terminal window into multiple terminal windows. It basically turns a single terminal window into a text-based tiling window manager that lets you run different shells concurrently in a single terminal, easily copy text between them, and have other quality of life improvements over using a single raw terminal.

    Imagine you’re SSH’d into a remote machine. Unless you SSH again from a different terminal at the same time, you’re basically limited to a single terminal, and whatever you’re doing is interrupted if your connection drops. tmux runs on the remote machine, which means that if your connection is interrupted, tmux will continue running exactly as you left it, and you’ll be able to reattach to it using tmux attach.

    Or, imagine your video drivers break and you’re forced to troubleshoot in a raw TTY. tmux will let you have a manpage and a shell open at the same time, or three different directories opened side by side. That’s a slightly more convoluted use case, but the point is that terminal multiplexers make it far more convenient to use the terminal in basically any situation that’s not just running a single short command and leaving.