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Julia Evans

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Notes on switching to Helix from vim Hello! Earlier this summer I was talking to a friend about how much I love using fish, and how I...
10th Oct 2025
25

Notes on switching to Helix from vim

from Julia Evans [alt+shift+b] in programming

10th Oct 2025
Hello! Earlier this summer I was talking to a friend about how much I love using fish, and how I love that I don’t have to configure it. They said that they feel the same way about the helix text editor, and so I decided to give it a try. I’ve been using it for 3 months now and...
Using `make` to compile C programs (for non-C-programmers) I have never been a C programmer but every so often I need to compile a C/C++ program from source....
10th Jun 2025
63

Using `make` to compile C programs (for non-C-programmers)

from Julia Evans [alt+shift+b] in programming

10th Jun 2025
I have never been a C programmer but every so often I need to compile a C/C++ program from source. This has been kind of a struggle for me: for a long time, my approach was basically “install the dependencies, run make, if it doesn’t work, either try to find a binary someone has...
Standards for ANSI escape codes Hello! Today I want to talk about ANSI escape codes. For a long time I was vaguely aware of ANSI...
7th Mar 2025
73

Standards for ANSI escape codes

from Julia Evans [alt+shift+b] in programming

7th Mar 2025
Hello! Today I want to talk about ANSI escape codes. For a long time I was vaguely aware of ANSI escape codes (“that’s how you make text red in the terminal and stuff”) but I had no real understanding of where they were supposed to be defined or whether or not there were...
Some terminal frustrations A few weeks ago I ran a terminal survey (you can read the results here) and at the end I...
5th Feb 2025
57

Some terminal frustrations

from Julia Evans [alt+shift+b] in programming

5th Feb 2025
A few weeks ago I ran a terminal survey (you can read the results here) and at the end I asked: What’s the most frustrating thing about using the terminal for you? 1600 people answered, and I decided to spend a few days categorizing all the responses. Along the way I learned that...
What's involved in getting a "modern" terminal setup? Hello! Recently I ran a terminal survey and I asked people what frustrated them. One person...
11th Jan 2025
89

What's involved in getting a "modern" terminal setup?

from Julia Evans [alt+shift+b] in programming

11th Jan 2025
Hello! Recently I ran a terminal survey and I asked people what frustrated them. One person commented: There are so many pieces to having a modern terminal experience. I wish it all came out of the box. My immediate reaction was “oh, getting a modern terminal experience isn’t...
"Rules" that terminal programs follow Recently I’ve been thinking about how everything that happens in the terminal is some combination...
12th Dec 2024
107

"Rules" that terminal programs follow

from Julia Evans [alt+shift+b] in programming

12th Dec 2024
Recently I’ve been thinking about how everything that happens in the terminal is some combination of: Your operating system’s job Your shell’s job Your terminal emulator’s job The job of whatever program you happen to be running (like top or vim or cat) The first three (your...
New microblog with TILs I added a new section to this site a couple weeks ago called TIL (“today I learned”). the goal: save...
9th Nov 2024
84

New microblog with TILs

from Julia Evans [alt+shift+b] in programming

9th Nov 2024
I added a new section to this site a couple weeks ago called TIL (“today I learned”). the goal: save interesting tools & facts I posted on social media One kind of thing I like to post on Mastodon/Bluesky is “hey, here’s a cool thing”, like the great SQLite repl litecli, or the...
Terminal colours are tricky Yesterday I was thinking about how long it took me to get a colorscheme in my terminal that I was...
1st Oct 2024
68

Terminal colours are tricky

from Julia Evans [alt+shift+b] in programming

1st Oct 2024
Yesterday I was thinking about how long it took me to get a colorscheme in my terminal that I was mostly happy with (SO MANY YEARS), and it made me wonder what about terminal colours made it so hard. So I asked people on Mastodon what problems they’ve run into with colours in the...
Reasons I still love the fish shell I wrote about how much I love fish in this blog post from 2017 and, 7 years of using it every day...
12th Sep 2024
94

Reasons I still love the fish shell

from Julia Evans [alt+shift+b] in programming

12th Sep 2024
I wrote about how much I love fish in this blog post from 2017 and, 7 years of using it every day later, I’ve found even more reasons to love it. So I thought I’d write a new post with both the old reasons I loved it and some reasons. This came up today because I was trying to...
Go structs are copied on assignment (and other things about Go I'd missed) I’ve been writing Go pretty casually for years – the backends for all of my playgrounds (nginx, dns,...
6th Aug 2024
74
6th Aug 2024
I’ve been writing Go pretty casually for years – the backends for all of my playgrounds (nginx, dns, memory, more DNS) are written in Go, but many of those projects are just a few hundred lines and I don’t come back to those codebases much. I thought I more or less understood the...
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