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I have barely watched Breaking Bad
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Let's have another good week everyone
getting in before any other tech literate trans woman does to say the line. install arch, you should run arch, btw did you know I run arch? (I do not, that shit is too complicated for me)
Installing arch:
>guide says check your network devices with a utility
>do so
>guide goes on to talk about some other thing meanwhile there's no way out of the network utility bar alt-f4
Genius, user friendly, idiot proof design. I installed openbsd with minimal issue but Arch itself is fucking stupid.
ctrl-C didn’t work?
who the fuck would think to use ctrl-c to exit a goddamn program? I tried esc, alt-f4, ctrl-x, (which exits terminal text editors in arch) no dice lol
ctrl-C in the terminal, unless it’s being overridden, sends SIGINT to the currently running program which typically causes it to close. It’s really useful for closing programs when you don’t know how to do it otherwise (like I don’t know if
ping
even has another way to close it) and when you use it on the command line it just discards what you’ve typed and drops you to a new prompt. Although text editors usually override it (like on nano (best editor) it just reports your cursor position and doesn’t send the SIGTERM). ctrl-Z also sends SIGTSTP which pauses the currently running program and moves it to the background and if you want to use it with nano (you do, it’s really convenient) you can just edit your nanorc file to enable suspension and map^Z
tosuspend
Side note, but a really common exit command is
q
, which is probably what the utility wantedI use nano, good editor...
So like where was I supposed to learn this? Arch wiki doesn't say any of this shit.
I think the guide probably assumes you already know about ^C, but as for the utility, a good way to learn about any terminal program is its man page. Just type
man [program]
and it’ll bring up the man page which explains how to use it. Just press/
to search the page,q
(or^C
) to close it, andh
to bring up the help menu. Seriously,man
is essential and I use it all the time, and it’s generally your first go-to for a quick summary of how to use a program. When I was first learning how to use the terminal I literally just typedman bash
a lot lolEdit: also, typically
[program] --help
or even-h
will print a brief list of options for use with that command. The bashhelp
command can also be used for the actual bash commands (likealias
) which typically don’t have man pages (unless you count bash’s) as opposed to the external programsEdit2: I should say that none of this is specific to arch, it’s just general unix stuff but I think the arch installation guide assumes you know it already
Why the fuck would I know that lmao. Idiot proof, I was told.
More arcane secrets, kinda reminds me of the text interpreter in Sierra games vs Infocom ones.
man bash
though... I could man bashLmfao whoever told you arch was idiot proof was wrong. Like, it’s not gentoo but it’s not always straightforward either. I was actually talking to someone once about installing arch and I was like “it was actually pretty easy. Well, I did have to debug a couple kernel module conflicts…” lol
man
andman bash
for stuff about the shell itself are your gateways to most of the other arcane secrets. Just knowing the basics and knowing how to look stuff up is enough to do basically anythingSeriously though it’s great. Not fancy as, say, emacs but very easy to use and you can still do a lot with it. I actually do all my programming in nano
Lmao really, that's super cool. I just use it to edit config files in whatever arch basted distro but it is appealing somehow.
It’s not just on arch! It comes with most distros, and I’m sure it’s available on bsd too, though maybe not out of the box since it’s a gnu thing. I know it at least used to be available on mac because I used it on a macbook lol. At school I even use it on the windows machines in wsl and there’s probably a native version too, but you cannot make me use powershell lol. It’s also pretty easy to just compile from source on whatever system you have