your TTY driver has configuration

you can see how it’s configured by running:

stty -a

for example it print out the current window size!

Ctrl+S

by default, pressing Ctrl+S wi(( freeze your terminal (and Ctrl+Q wi(( unfreeze) I have never wanted this in my life, you can turn it off with stty -ixon (fish turns it off by default)

###fun fact: changing Ctrl+C technically you can use stty to set a different keyboard shortcut for Ctrl+C, (ike “u”

stty intr u

this is extremely chaotic and I can’t imagine a reason that I would ever do this though

programs have to configure the TTY driver to get friendly features

developer: I want arrow keys to work in my program!

other person: better tell the TTY driver to turn off canonical mode! (more on the next page)

the TTY driver’s settings are called “termios settings”

for the gnarly details:

man termios

but if you’re writing a terminal program libraries like readline or ncurses will handle setting up the TTY driver

panel 6

smiling stick figure with short curly hair: I’ve only needed to use stty once in the last 20 years and I mostly don’t understand its output but I think it’s a fun view into terminal internals!