Exploring Your Terminal
Terminal talk slideshow and materials
This page provides access to a slideshow and related materials for a talk, first given at the Linux Users Group of Davis (LUGOD), that provides an overview of UNIX terminal features and useful terminal tools.
The slideshow and its associated materials are available via a GitHub repository, and are provided under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license (CC BY-SA 3.0).
The slideshow is accompanied by a number of interactive demos intended to provide examples and details about various topics mentioned in the slides. To download these examples, either clone the repository at github with git, or download the .zip version using the link on that page (or by clicking here). That archive contains the entire set of slides as well as the interactive terminal demos.
As you run through the slides, some of them will have commands for you to try, [ marked like this ]. Go ahead and try running them to see what they do.
Many of these interactive demos have spoken patter that was intended to go along with it, which may greatly improve understanding of what's going on during the demo. If you attended the talk, you may remember the discussion well enough for the demos to be of use to you, but otherwise they may leave you confused. The author intends to remedy this situation at some point by creating video versions of the slide presentation, including video recordings of the terminal demos and the spoken patter that goes with them; but in the meantime you'll have to do without.
Demo requirements
For all of these interactive demos, you will need to make sure that you have installed on your system GNU m4, and GNU teseq (written by the slideshow author). While GNU teseq has been made available in package form on a number of modern systems, these demos work best using teseq version 1.1. In particular, if a version of the reseq program that is older than version 1.1 is used, then it will fail to halt and wait for a user keypress at moments where it was meant to. The demos will still run, but they may rush through parts that were intended for explanation and so forth.
At the time of this writing, teseq 1.1 was only very
recently released, and will not have made its way into
various operating system packages yet. However, installing
the reseq command from version 1.1 is fairly
easy. You can download the source package as a tarball, from
a GNU mirror
(be sure to take one of the 1.1 packages, and not 1.0.0),
unpack the tarball, and copy the reseq program
from the unpacked source directory anywhere in your
PATH (make sure that it is used in preference
to any system-installed version, by running reseq
--version to verify that you get the 1.1 copy).
The reseq program is the only part of teseq
used by the interactive demos, and is written in Perl, so it
does not require any of the rest of teseq to be installed in
order to function.
Please run the demos in an xterm-compatible terminal that is sized 80 columns by 25 lines and uses UTF-8 character encoding; many of the demos will not function properly if they are run in any width other than exactly 80 characters wide. Running in a terminal that has more than 25 lines will probably not cause any problems; but running in a terminal shorter than that will.
If running with reseq 1.1, most of the demos have moments where they wait for the user to press a key. In most cases, this is indicated with a colored triplet of hashes (###); however, in some cases it is indicated only with the presence of a middot character (·). (The middot will only display properly in a terminal using the UTF-8 character encoding.)
Links
Software Links
| bsdutils (script/scriptreplay) | (no site; install package for your OS) |
| nethack (terminal RPG) | http://www.nethack.org/ |
| ncurses (tput, infocmp, terminfo | http://www.gnu.org/software/ncurses/) |
| promptjobs | http://micah.cowan.name/projects/promptjobs/ |
| s5 - HTML slideshows | http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/ |
| screen | http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/ |
| teseq | http://www.gnu.org/software/teseq/ |
| tmux | http://sourceforge.net/projects/tmux/ |
| vim | http://www.vim.org/ |
ANSI Terminal Animations
| Nyan Cat | http://miku.acm.uiuc.edu/ |
| Star Wars | telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl |
Specifications and Standards
(Freely available!)
| Xterm control sequences | http://invisible-island.net/xterm/ctlseqs/ctlseqs.html |
| ASCII / ISO-646 | http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/ECMA-006.HTM |
| Control sequences for changing character sets (ISO 2022) | http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/ECMA-035.HTM |
| “ANSI” control sequences | http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/ECMA-048.HTM |