sometimes annoying things happen in the terminal:

• why doesn’t Ctrl+C quit??
• why can’t I select text?

these things aren’t random: different “types” of programs have different conventions for how you interact with them!

here are some categories of programs & their conventions!

1. REPLs

(python3, your shell)
you type code, press Enter and it runs the code

rules:

• quit with Ctrl+D (only works on an empty line)
• usually you have a million keyboard shortcuts for editing text
• usually there’s history

2. full screen “TUI”s

(less, htop, ncdu, lazygit, mtr)

rules:

• quit with q (usually)
• you can often navigate with arrow keys
• often ? will open the help
• to select text with the mouse, press Shift

3. noninteractive programs

or slightly interactive
(grep, git, sort, scp)

you start it, maybe it asks you a question or two, it does stuff, and it exits

rules:

• quit with Ctrl+C

4. wrappers

(ssh, env, tmux, rlwrap, unbuffer)
these wrap other terminal programs in some way

rules:

• when the program(s) they’re wrapping exits, they exit

5. other

lots of things don’t fit info these 4 categories: text editors, games, email clients, IRC clients, …

rules:

• I avoid these unless (like with vim) I’ve made a special effort to learn the program