Some terminal frustrations

> inconsistent command line arguments: is it -h or help or –help?

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the error "Option `--help` not understood, did you mean `-help`? Use `-help` to display program options." is one of the most insulting things a program can say to me. `--help` is the lowest common denominator. You have to support it. I don't care what your program has to special case in its parsing, just do it. If I knew your program's preferred syntax, I wouldn't be asking it for help.

Atuin.sh solved all my problems with history: history by project : check, history by session :check, global history: check. And if you want you can share history between computers. I just have to enter 2-4 letters and I can found complex command to rerun or to reuse as example.

> discoverability (55) There were lots of comments about this, which all came down to the same basic complaint – it’s hard to discover useful tools or features! This comment kind of summed it all up:

> How difficult it is to learn independently. Most of what I know is an assorted collection of stuff I’ve been told by random people over the years.

This is all too true, the discoverability aspect is one of the reasons why we exist (0), and there is lots to improve here for discovering terminal tools, how to install and use them.

Also thanks for running this survey Julia.

Also, let us know on what we can improve on the site if you find Terminal Trove useful for you.

(0) https://terminaltrove.com/

I like vivid[1] for managing colours in the terminal. It sets LS_COLORS to configure colours for many tools in one command.

[1] https://github.com/sharkdp/vivid

Making command line tools at work really made me appreciate the work it takes to make a good one.

Do you have a good `--help`? Did you catch the common mistakes and return a helpful error message? Did you put reasonable defaults? Do you have enough examples on how to actually use it: not just one running example, but actually one that uses at least _some_ of the options.

Your UX instincts do get tested in this.

I didn't realize until now how many problems I avoided by using Emacs and ansi-term (and usually tmux running in it). Stuff like struggling with color schemes or remembering key bindings... I just solved them once many years ago and don't even remember anymore how I did it. Same for copy and paste.

A lot of problems mentioned in the survey aren't really problems with the terminal, but, I guess, respondents didn't care about that kind of precision. Like... AWK syntax isn't a problem with terminals at all.

Whatever version of find I have installed, it's an incredibly bad actor:

  > $ find --help
  > find: illegal option -- -
  >
  > $ find -help
  > find: illegal option -- h
  >
  > $ find -h
  > find: illegal option -- h

My current secrets:

* cht.sh is a great way to avoid a lot of this stuff - there's a commandline tool as well

* usable cli ai setup: simonw's llm (https://github.com/simonw/llm) + openrouter (https://github.com/simonw/llm-openrouter) + free models (https://openrouter.ai/models?max_price=0) + glow (https://github.com/charmbracelet/glow) + adding this to your .rc file:

     function lm {
       local input="$*"
       llm -s 'Answer as short and concise as possible'  ${input} | glow
     }

    $ lm "ssh command to forward the port 5050 on user@remote to my localhost:7001" 
      ssh -L 7001:localhost:5050 user@remote                                        
    $

Some lesser game-changers:

* tmux extrakto - opens an "fzf" like search of all the text on the screen. So after a "git status", I can do git add (run extracto - enter partial path, press tab) and continue: https://github.com/laktak/extrakto

* mcfly history: https://github.com/cantino/mcfly just watch the demo, you'll see

* ugrep: grep with a powerful tui: https://github.com/Genivia/ugrep - I became an instant convert.

* batcat: https://github.com/sharkdp/bat ... you really need to use some of its other features to leverage it. It's really nice.

Am I the only one to whom the term _terminal frustrations_ sounds like things that frustrate you and then you die?

I have often thought it would be fun to have a Smalltalk like interaction screen, where you could leave snippets of code lying around and a “do it” menu item.

Kind of like how most of the SQL systems like dBeaver work. I have a scratchpad of SQL in a file I use for fiddly jobs, and a file like that for shell commands would be good if it had all the flags for awk or grep or whatever handy.

Would also be cool for the AWS and azure cli tools. I had something half working as an old VisualWorks experiment that implemented an AWS service on one side and a scratchpad in the middle but I feel like it might be a very cool vscode extension instead.

For colorsheme allow me to suggest https://github.com/savq/melange-nvim

Has configs for multiple programs, is warm (low blue light), avoids too many colors / clown vomit

I was considering giving up on colors with zenbones before I found this

For copy/paste I'm using a 36 key keyboard, ctrl is on a thumb key hold, while holding , is shift-ctrl. But that's probably not as generally useful to others

Previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42970632

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42975816

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42959824

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42953869