Description
Interested in turbocharging your Terminal and taking your workflow to the next level? This Birds of a Feather session is for you!
All operating systems are welcome ... but check your mouse at the door and keep your fingers on the home row.
Come to share your Terminal tips and tricks, or just to listen and learn. Beginners welcome!
Matt Obert
Esteemed Director of Screening @ Esteemed, Inc.Matt Obert has more than twenty years of experience building and hosting LAMP-stack web applications. He has worked in both corporate and non-profit environments, always utilizing the latest technology to support art, design, commerce and philanthropy.
MATT:
I See a couple of people I recognize. You guys wanna unmute yourselves where we can go round and do a round of introductions? And (INAUDIBLE) just say your name and what operating system you use and if you use a command line environment, what shell? What Shell do use? I guess I'll start. My name is Matt. I work for esteemed (INAUDIBLE) esteemed director of screening. My primary workstation environment is Linux, although I do have Linux, Mac and Windows on my desk at all times. So, I'm Linux and Mac. I use zeShell. And on Windows I use, I believe it's bash that comes with the Windows subsystem for Linux. Although sometimes I just use git bash as well.
LEN LAMBERG:
My is Len Lamberg. I have a Windows 10 machine, I'm using WSL too. So, it's Linux and Ubuntu running on that.
ADRIAN MCKEE:
I'm Adrian McKee. I use Linux and I use zeShell.
JACK FRANKS:
I'm Jack Franks from Drupal. My primary development environment is Mac, and I've got(INAUDIBLE), and I've got that set up pretty reasonably. But then I also have to do (INAUDIBLE) net stuff. So, I've got windows for that and I'm entirely git bash for that ,in some power show.
RODLEY:
(INAUDIBLE). I use a Mac. I use the basic (INAUDIBLE) use, git bash sometimes as well.
ROB:
I am Rob and I am on a Mac. And currently still
MATT:
(INAUDIBLE) bash. Is that everybody who wants to talk. I feel like it's just a couple of the people. I see Matt Pritchard from the (INAUDIBLE) but I don't know if... Do you use the command line (INAUDIBLE)?
MATT PRITCHARD:
Yeah. I use Mac and then a command line sometimes basically just CDLs until I find what I need. I used it the other day to spin a VJS project. So, I installed node or NPM install so I got some good experience there. It's been a little while since I've had the actually (INAUDIBLE) terminal but it's fine. Whatever I do, I always feel like I'm using the Matrix or trying to get in there. You know, I can't imagine what it must be like at a really, really, really high level. Must be kind of fun.
MATT:
Yeah. I started out as a Linux system administrator back in the 1990s. I just remember when I was a kid, I had a Commodore 64 and I used to play those Zork games, the text adventures. And when I first got like my first Shell account on the Linux system, I was like... I just felt like I should just, you know, I didn't know what to type. I was like, I wanted to be like, you know, use the bronze key and the wooden door or like the things that you would type to solve puzzle and these all text adventures. Like Lamp, you know. So, I felt like that was just kind of the adventure began with that. And I just had to figure out what commands to type to kind of unlock all the puzzles that way. So, yeah. Does anybody wanna volunteer. Like what command line tools are essential to your day to day workflow?
LEN LAMBERG:
I'm using DDEV a lot.
MATT:
Excellent.
KAREN:
Yeah, I use DDEV and Lando. So... But of course, I git. What's the new GH one? GitHub command line.
MATT:
Yeah,. I haven't used that yet. I've been meaning to try that out.
MAN:
I use GitHub command line my Windows machine. It's nice. Lando for life though.
KAREN:
(LAUGHS) Well, I do both WordPress and Drupal development, so either Lando or DDEV.
MAN:
I understand that.
KAREN:
(INAUDIBLE)
MAN:
DDEV was my first love, and actually I was in (UNKNOWN) one of his training seminars three or four years ago. And it was really inspiring to get there and like it. it's a really good tool. I can't say that I use one or the other. I use pretty much every day. Pantheon's, Permanent Command Line. All that good stuff.
KAREN:
Yeah. And of course, there's also.... What am I thinking. No. Someone else, go ahead, I'm blanking right now. Oh! Drush and composer?
MAN:
Yes.
MATT:
Yes. At Drupal event, what would we do without Drush? Absolutely.
KAREN:
But when I started using composer, I had to remember not to enable or not to load modules via Drush to use composer instead and then use drush to enable them. That was a little shift I had to remember.
MAN:
It's far fetched from right clicking and saving the URL the zip file and pasting it into the uploader (INAUDIBLE). Drupal 7. And that's how I used to roll.
KAREN:
downloading it and then unzipping it on your desktop and then taking that folder and putting it into Drupal.
MATT:
Yeah. STT days. Totally.
RODLEY:
(INAUDIBLE) It took me a long time. I forgot the (INAUDIBLE) composer as well. And I was one of those hesitant ones to leave the FTP steps. But I'm still learning. I actually have a lot to learn about composer and all those command lines.
MAN:
Oh. It never stops. It never stops. Once you get command line, you gonna be be like, what else can I do with a command line? Can I turn the lights off at my house with command line?
MATT:
Probably.
KAREN:
Someone I had come up with a way to play your Spotify via the command line. I tried doing it on my Mac and I couldn't solve it. But...
MAN:
Actually, that's the only way to use Spotify if you're using BSD for your OS. They don't even have a client. It's... There's a command line interface for Spotify and it uses Spotify (UNKNOWN) is the library so that your computer recognizes your computer as a playable device, but there's no interface. And so the only interface is a command line interface for Spotify, which is kind of funny. I've tried to use Slack Command Line and Linux and I just kind of gave up.(LAUGHS).
MATT:
I used to listen to music, you know, instead of with a graphical player. I would have like all my whatever, all my CDs that I ripped just in folders and I would just use mplayer, which is actually a video player. But as this command line thing and I could like cue up playlists and stuff, you know, I would just tell it to like, you know, play all the files in the directory with like (INAUDIBLE) have it just like one after the other, play all the songs. Or you can have it do like, you know, you can even pipe things to... Say, like you do, like, find all the files in all these nested directories and like (INAUDIBLE) to the player, you know. It's kind of crazy to just leave that running in another window. I don't do that so much anymore.
MAN:
And I used to play Winamp. (LAUGHS).
MATT:
I remember Winamp too. Yeah.
MAN:
I used it to test... Sometimes I used it to test whether I've got one working right, 'cause it's like the only... It's pretty safe (INAUDIBLE) with one like when I'm testing out anything they wanna run on Linux's window, (INAUDIBLE). OK. Cool. We'll start from there.
MATT:
It's funny. Well, let me think about this here. I heard somebody say this fish and I have not used that one yet. But then I switched to zeshell about maybe four years ago, and I was just won immediately by the, just all the plug ins for it and all the aliases. And I found especially, you know, you shouldn't come to rely on this, but with the git plug in, I found that suddenly I just was so fast. Everything that I did was just like, you know, GP to push something or GL to pull or, you know. And I have a couple of aliases of my own. I use one that's GPU key which is like, when there isn't an upstream branch yet and you have to create it so you can push to it. Like I run a little one liner for that. So, you know, I've heard good things about fish I think. Did that come after zeShell? And then... And some of its features were pulled back to zeShell
MAN:
I'm not really sure. Fish is new to me. I've been a zeshell user for a few years now. I've not tried fish. I have to check that out.
MATT:
I think somebody in the comments is saying perhaps that they think the zeSH has POSIX support, but I don't think it actually is fully POSIX compliant. I think that, like, if you're really looking for that, you should stick with Bash or, you know, SH or whatever, you know. But it's... I find it to be a better... Like I would use Bash for shell scripts and things that are part of server maintenance or dev ops and deploys and stuff like that. But I just find that these interactive shells like zeshell or fish are really, really good for an interactive environment where you're actually working and getting your work done. You don't necessarily have to worry so much about portability to different systems.
MAN:
Unless you're like me and then you get deep into (INAUDIBLE) your zeShell. Then productivity goes right out the window and I'm like, can I make this look like the matrix? (INAUDIBLE) Yeah.You know what? I like that though. The plug ins are fantastic for zeShell and I've barely even begun to scratch the surface.
RODLEY:
So would you put Japanese in your terminal there?
MAN:
Just let it run down (INADIBLE). You can see my terminal but not read anything. And I'm just like code reader. I totally know what's going on. And it's, I like zeShell for that. There's an app called hyper.Js. That's a pretty cool shell. It's fully, Let me see. I think it's hyper... Yes. I may be wrong. Yes. Hyper.js, , I'm sorry, is the name of it. I'll post it chat. It's an electron based terminal and works with zeShell., Works on Mac OS, Windows, Debian Fedora and other Linux systems. And it's cool because it actually (INAUDIBLE) and stuff that you can, like 100% customize your shell. I use it quite a bit.
MATT:
There you go. That's for you if you really(INAIDIBLE) your terminal to look like the Matrix. *CROSSS TSLK). See Matrix is an ASCII screen saver that will take over your terminal with the Matrix.
MAN:
That's a lot of fun, right? That's interesting. back.(INAUDIBLE). That's cool Karen.
MATT:
Yes, I have heard that. You are the second person to mention that. Cause I was talking to somebody else about that just the other day, they were mentioning, you know, what shell they were using 'cause they thought it was Bash and they were on a Mac. And they're like, oh my gosh, it's actually zeShell. They've changed it.
MAN:
That's pretty sweet.
MATT:
Yeah, I totally agree with that. Thank you for that, Karen.
MAN:
I haven't used my Mac and in a while, so I'll have to look at it and be like, Oh yeah, that's cool. I'm using a vendor supplied machine right now for the contract that I'm on, so my Mac doesn't get a whole lot of love right now.
MATT:
Gonna see if I can send another link to myself here. Just(INAUDIBLE).This is an article that I have shared many, many times here, get it. Slack it from one computer to another so I can pitch to the zoom chat. Here we go. Copy link.
RODLEY:
Matt, do you have any good cheat sheets for composer? I'm sure you gonna (INAUDIBLE) somethings like that as well.
MATT:
(INAUDIBLE) That's not what I just sent was with sort of like an ultimate guide to your terminal makeover, which is geared toward Mac OS people. But for composer, I mean, I would just... If I ever got stuck, you know, I would just Google like composing this or that or I would go to... If I'm really, really stuck, I end up going to the composer channel and Drupal slack, which is where a lot of people hang out who actually write this stuff, you know, and really, really know well. But Google avails, you know, and composers got pretty good documentation on its own. I'm not sure in terms of git.
ROB:
They can look like (UNKNOWN) has over the course of the last month. Several talks about how to get the most out of composer. And that's it's basically a cheat sheet, so. That I would go for just watch on google TV one or two (INAUDIBLE)
RODLEY:
OK. Thank you, Rob.
MATT:
Yeah. Mike is great. I find, let me think what else, 'cause, like, you know, everything... There's always new things that come out. But then you also... You get stuck in the things that you... Once you learn a thing, if it helps you out, you kind of just stick with it. So I keep on... I learned a long time ago about (INAUDIBLE) screen, which allows you to sort of separate unnecessary session into different tabs that you can switch between with keyboard shortcuts. And I keep on meaning to check out tmax, which is the other one, you know, the the fancier one (INAUDIBLE) multiplex. But I just haven't quite gone around that corner. It's just like, You know VI, you feel like you never need to learn tmax or whatever, you know. Does anybody use any of these kind of like Terminal Multiplex's or anything like that? anything to split your screens or do anything fancy like that?
LEEQUE01:
I used to use. On my Linux machine, I think it was called Terminator or something like that. And you could have several terminals open in different, like portions of the train. About the closest that I come to that now is to use the terminal at the bottom, the visual (INAUDIBAL) studio, and then I split it (INAUDIBLE).
MATT:
Well, if you're on a Mac, there's the iterm too which is sort of cool thing. I'm looking right now. Thank you (UNKNOWN) for Tilix. I'm looking that up right now. I have not used so I'm checking out there (INAUDIBLE) online. And it looks very cool.
LEEQUE01:
(INAUDIBLE).
MATT:
So, this is for Linux and it's got drag and drop support, it's can eve support multiple panes, persistent way out. It's very interesting. Thank you. That's very cool. I will check that out. I guess I wanted to hang out here. Let's see if I get another question in my (LAUGHS). I'll tell you when I first, you know, when I first set up a computer. There's always like a lot of little tweaking to do. You know, you can get work done without all these all these things. But then there's certain things that are just the first things you do to set things up, to install things. Does anybody have anything that you always put like in your in your Bash, RC or your (INAUDIBLE) your run command file that you always find is one of the first things that you add? Yeah. Power line. Exactly. That font that... I use that as well. And it's... I always waste a little bit of time with a new computer setting it up because, you know, you set it up for your default terminal, but then you've also gonna get it so, if there's a terminal in your IDE, it might not work.
You know, you have to do a bunch of different steps to make sure it's all set up everywhere.
JACK FRANKS:
Yeah, I can get a little bit anti-tool that way. I will put stuff in that, like, really measurably saves me time or make something easier like Iterm and having the, like your get branch and you get know, like check out status and whatever in colors or in text, you know, on the command line. But past that it takes some real doing to get me to adopt a tool. I don't ever wanna have a tool on my machine that I don't use. And a lot of my, you know, like my co-workers who are really tool happy, they'll be, you know, looking through their applications for something. And then like I hear all the time, oh, yeah, I forgot I installed this. I don't ever wanna have any of that on my machine. So, I'm very slim, you know, very lean with what I set up and what I install. I went down the route of I wanna just learn how to use them. I wanna learn how to use Emacs, because, of course, you know, our default editor is VI and our default command line interface is emacs. So you have to, you know, you have to remember, you know, your dollar signs and carrots and your control As and control Bs and whatever.
I'm a big believer in learning how to use the tools that you have instead of trying to adopt the cool new thing.
MAN:
(INAUDIBLE) to you on that. (INAUDIBLE) tough. (INAUDIBLE).
MATT:
Yeah, you know, when you first... The newbie makes their first git command and if VI is the default editor on the system and they don't know how to exit it, there's a very funny git repo called how to exit VI, which is a ridiculous workarounds, including like different ways to kill the process, you know, just complicated stuff.
WOMAN:
You just (INAUDIBLE) to set it on fire, right? I use nano, so?
MAN:
Right. Any time after there's like (INAUDIBLE) conflict and then VI shows up, I'm like, oh crap. OK. (UNKNOWN). Yeah.
MATT:
No. Yeah, that's what you need to know.
MAN:
No, no comments on my comment. Just it's blank.(LAUGHS).
MATT:
I gotta say, I'm a dissenter here. I definitely, think it's worth the time to learn at least just the VI basics, just to be able to navigate in it, because you never know, you know, any system that you end up working in some weird remote system that's totally in a weird lockdown environment. And some companies private, AWS and like there's nothing on it but VI you know. And what are you gonna do? It's kind of like sometimes these things happen, you know, especially even on the oldest systems. Even if you're trying to work on somebody weird legacy system, that's like some old, you know, AIX machine or something, you know. You're bound to find VI support on it. It's interesting to... It's just a good thing to be able to fall back on just in an emergency if people don't use it for a daily driver.
MAN:
We spent a whole semester in computer science. I don't remember when, but a whole semester just on VI.
MATT:
Well maybe that will turn you off to it if you've got to do it. I wanna come back to... I can't remember who is saying this, but the kind of being anti tool and not wanting to set up your system with too much stuff on it. And that's not portable. And I think that I've come around a little bit of a band now, now that I'm starting to use Docker based tooling, like Lando or(UNKNOWN). I wanna try and set up each project so that it has the tools that it needs in a way that I can keep it in the git repo so that it's portable and then it moves with the project so that anybody can use it, you know. And I find that that's a different sort of philosophy. t's not gonna... It won't install power line fonts on your, you know, on your computer, but it will allow you to package up different things that are shortcuts specific to the project that you're working on. And, you know, you can make custom tooling in Lando or custom commands and data that are gonna have... That speed up development for everybody on the team, even the least technical people on the team who would never necessarily sit down and write that stuff themselves, you know.
You can make it available to them in a way that's portable.
JACK FRANKS:
Yep, agreed. That goes along with me, I want to install the absolute minimum of stuff possible. We've got QA effort doing a bunch of Cypress and end testing and it was, infuriating, is too strong a word. But like the fact that I had to install node locally in order to run Cypress, I was so fast. I was so angry because that now on this machine, that is the very first like dev tool kind of the thing that I installed locally on this machine. Everything else is in containers.
MATT:
Yup, yup. And when you get into this situation where something has to be on the local machine, then as soon as someone else on the team pulls it out, it's completely different computer, completely different setup, different version of node, you know, and like you got to track down these issues. So, it's just a nightmare. Definitely (INAUDIBLE) philosophy.
KAREN:
And the mtime and dot MPMRC.
MATT:
Yes. Yup.
KAREN:
Yeah, I have an old project that we work on, and it's an older version of gulp. So, it needs like an old version eleven point something, and it's just like every time I start the project and no one put the the node version requirement in there, it's just like, why can't I get gulped to work? Oh, yeah. Wrong node version.
MATT:
And if you ever work for an agency where they've been around for a long time and they have older clients, like even if they are totally up to the minute on the bleeding edge of everything and they're just in the space age with their tooling. Now, you work on a project for a client that's from like a few years back that just suddenly comes back saying, hey, can you just do this one thing? And suddenly you find you're using compass and, you know, like things that you haven't heard of in years. And, like, you have to, you know, and I was in that situation with an agency where the older projects, when you check them out, they didn't have any kind of local development environment bundled with it. You would just have to set it up with, like (INAUDIBLE) or something, because that was how it was done back then. You know, like... And then there were few years where they were using Drupal VI with, like, vagrant and ansible. And if you check out those, then that's what you have to use. And then they switched to Landoss.
Very interesting. I'm the worst at like these lugs come. I feel like as it because I'm talking too much or not asking enough questions. I'm trying to figure out. (LAUGHS)
KAREN:
No, I must say, going to Lando, which I used it when I was(UNKNOWN). (CROSS TALK). But just that was just a whole new step of development that I just fell in love with really early on, because we could take that project and I could have someone else on the team work on it and set up their own local environment.
SPEAKER:
With, you know, less knots, less roadblocks. The holy grail of the 15-minute onboarding, you just pull the repo lando start, installs everything you need, even if you're on a slow computer, you watch it build one time, you know. And then it should be pretty fast after that. We got one readme file. I can tell people just go off and follow the instructions. Yes, and I find myself reading longer and longer readme's with more and more instructions. Which is great 'cause it tells people exactly what to do in every situation. So it's good. I started building notion pages with toggles and like, OK, so if you're going to be installing the local development for the first time on this project, here's everything you need to do. And this is what your lando yaml file should roughly look like. And, yeah. Yeah, I just keep the lando.yaml file on the project repo and all they have to do is pull it and type lando start. So, they shouldn't have to edit it at all unless they're working on that part of things.
Exactly like, bhub we used to have a default.bhub.yaml and you would pull it down and do your thing, copy that over to bhub.yaml and then make your little changes. But now we have a dev environment that is the same for everyone and works for everyone. So, there's no boilerplate or template, nothing like your config file is your config file. If you follow the instructions and pull it down, it will just work. And that's a game-changer. Yeah. And if there are things that would have needed to be copied over from a boilerplate file and hand-edited, you can replace those values in that config file with variables. That you're then pulling from like, you know, some JSON object that has all that stuff in it that you need for that environment that may be different from person to person. So you can just switch it all at once and then just have one file that doesn't change. That's sourcing, whatever you get for your source will be your variable data. Yeah, so one more point on command line stuff, as opposed to dev environment stuff, and I've been thinking about it for three or four minutes now and thinking how weird it might be to say that I just love to type.
So, like, I find that I don't even rc very much stuff. I don't have, cute little shortcuts like, GPU or whatever. I'm sure it would, saves time or whatever. But I enjoy typing, like I have, I don't know, I've got cool keyboards and... Oh, he's got the mechanical keyboards? Hold them up. (CROSSTALK). That's cool. Now, I had to share the space with my husband so, (CROSSTALK) a very quiet Mac keyboard. Ihave one of those too for working at night. (CROSSTALK). Someone had said something about not knowing how to get into or out of vi I had a co-worker at one point sit down at my desk. And so I had, you know, I have a blank keyboard, there's no labels on it. And he just sat down and went ahhh and then so fine I'm like, OK, use this one, take the Mac keyboard and then he tries to commit something and vi pops up and he , ahhh, I'll do it. I'm rocking a Unicomp M Buckling Springs for life. An old ibm chord. Very cool. It's super loud, actually, when I worked at Martins, E.C Martins Company, I had it there for four years and my coworkers, when I was gone one day for lunch, replaced my keyboard and told me to take it home.
Because it was too loud.(CROSSTALK) Take it home. So I got some cherry blue switches and they didn't really solve the problem because I was clacking away with some heavy keys. I haven't gotten to that level where I actually changed out my switches to see if they have a different, like, you know, what ones are quieter or anything like that. Yeah, it makes it different. The blues are my favorite. I've bought one with Browns just because it was quieter, but I didn't like typing on it. And you got to feel the resistance a little bit, yeah exactly. I enjoy mechanical keyboard. I've spent a lot of money on some dumb things, but I don't think that was one of them. I'm in that key cap scene. Ialso don't kep caps and all that good stuff. I've got a couple different beaders. But I grew up on a Commodore 64, so what do you expect? Yeah, I was just going to say my favorite membrane keyboard was actually the one in my old, my amiga 1000. (CROSS TALK). Yeah. I know if there's an RG112 USB C adapter that I could use to maybe dig one of those up, but that would be, it feels nice.
No, I think you've gotta use, you're saying to actually hook up that keyboard to the USB, that's right. I'm sorry, here I was thinking you wanted to emulate Amiga, like you wanted to run the old video toaster or something. Oh, I think you can do that in the browser nowadays. I don't think that's a big deal. Yeah. But, if you're nostalgic for that specific keyboard, you're gonna have to come up with some whacky do adapter. They probably exist. They make one for the model F, the IBM original keyboard that if they make one so that it translates to PS2 or whatever the format. But I found that out the hard way. I have an IBM model 5150 from 1981 that's right next to me that I still use. Yeah, there we go, wow, first modern model F mechanical keyboard. An 80's base too, my goodness. Well it's turning to the keyboard chat channel here. I'm not, (CROSS TALK). Is anybody who can tell, you know, to newbies who came to pick up the command line tips? I will say one of the first things I always do, and this just goes back to my early early education, was somebody told me that when you first edit your bash rc or whatever shell you're using, the first thing that I add is an alias called resource, which is just source tilde/.
bashrc. So every time you add something, you just, once you save it, you just type resource so that you get your new commands together or whatever. I'd find that like I do more and more these days, customize the shell with things that are specific to the projects that I'm working on. And I also find the aliases just don't cut it anymore. You have to use functions for certain things if you learn shell function so they can accept arguments and there's other limitations of aliases. So, if, you know, once you get to multiline logic, you gonna wanna have a shell function, if not a whole standalone shell script, but like you can just put these things in your bashrc or your zsharc and like have a function way down at the end of it. That is for whatever you're working on, that saves some time or automates something repetitive, you know. And I find myself making some of these things and kinda putting them in there from time to time. Yeah, I spent a lot of time getting aliases, set up shortcuts, that sort of stuff, and then like you're saying, I get on a new machine and I'm lost again.
Some people do keep these things, like if they really trick out their shell rc files, then they'll just keep them in and get repo. And so they move to a new machine and they can do that. Or if there's software that you need to set up too, sometimes people will actually use an ansible playbook to like run on a new computer that installs everything they need or whatever, you know. So it's similar to provisioning a server with something like Puppet or chef or whatever, you know. You haven't gotten to that level. But I worked with (UNKNOWN). I haven't even gotten to the level of committing them to get. I have a tendency to try to do so many things from memory and (UNKNOWN) if I could just remember, if I could just remember to push this up to a repo and then use it next time, then I won't have to remember the things that I forget. But. Speaking of memory, also, I will say that I am so spoiled now by the zshell auto completion. If I've typed anything remotely like it, like anywhere in my history, it just kind of guesses what I wanna type and I can just hit like the forward arrow, enter and just like do it again.
So I find, like, it's probably hurting my ability to form new memories where I like things that I should memorize. Exactly. And you get spoiled with that, like I'm switching back and forth between, I have zshell installed on the WSL two layer on this Windows machine and then I exit and I'm back at Power Shell and I'm like. what? wait, man, those shortcuts aren't there anymore. I gotta go back to. Speaking of PowerShell as well, I just started to learn, you know, how to set these things up on Windows properly. And I found that the deed of installation instructions were incredibly helpful for me to finally get WSL to set up correctly with Docker and all the stuff. Now, (UNKNOWN) works thanks to the deed of (UNKNOWN). You know, (UNKNOWN), Windows, and also because of the hyperdrive installer for lando. Now I have a decent V.I. of them configuration in my WSL tool. So that's all, it's all there now. Not that I have to use it, hopefully ever, but it's there in case I do. Yeah, that's cool, I've gotta do that, (UNKNOWN) because these Lando, Windows.
It would be nice to use it on WSL site. It's so much faster. It's crazy. It's crazy. You should, I can, I can, I'll paste that 'cause it's very, very helpful. I'll find this. You guys talk among yourselves while I look here for a second. Yeah. I that will boost my productivity immensely. Here it is, you know just google, DWSL2, it's the top here. OK. But it's instructions to set up did have local on Windows with WSl2 the preferred way. Which is actually run Docker inside WSL2. And it's just so much faster, it's so much better. And then once you've got that set up, if you follow that, then you can install Lando that way as well, 'cause you just install it like you go into WSL2 and you install it like you were installing it on Linux. That's awesome. Yeah, 'cause I made the mistake of trying to do that. The first without knowing about this and ran into the, ran into and obviously ran into problems with not knowing where Docker was and that sort of stuff. Yeah, I ran into such problems with that, that I honestly walked away from the whole thing for like probably six months afterwards.
I was so frustrated(CROSSTALK). I found this lock through, which, you know, and I think, again, that's probably we can think like (UNKNOWN) for pointing that one out as well, 'cause he was just to have lunch and learns. I think that's where I heard about this one. And boy within a week, I had figured it out. And it's like I'm no longer afraid to do development on Windows. I think I could handle that. I'm about 75% there. Not afraid. There's still some things that I miss, but I think that that might actually close the gap and make it easier for me. The company that I contract for sent me a Windows laptop and I'll work on their VPN and all that stuff. And I had previously been using MacOS and my daily I have a MacBook Pro that's fairly new and then I have a homebuilt Linux machine and that's what I used primarily for all of my development, was either one of those machines. And the switch between Linux and Mac wasn't nearly as I mean, those are interchangeable for me. But whenever we got to Windows, I was like completely lost.
I spent probably a week just trial and error, hammering away this Windows Machine, trying to make it do things that are out of the box. It wasn't designed to do. And one of those was as soon as I got WSL2 up and running, I was like, OK, there's some familiarity there. I can breathe a little bit. And so with this, that might just be the linchpin that closes that chapter. Yeah, I mean, I remember back to, you know, Windows XP days trying to do stuff with Cygwin or, you know, there's always been something that kind of purported to give you a kind of a shell like environment. But it never really worked right. You know, 'cause you just it's just a bunch of X's. It's a bunch of windows executable binaries that are kind of juked up to run the same kind of, you know, all of the new tools that you can run under a Unix, Linux environment or a Mac, which is Unix. I mean, it's(UNKNOWN) so. But yeah, it just wouldn't play nice with the actual underlying the file system. It's completely different rules, all the ownerships and permissions completely different.
And you get yourself in trouble if you try to use it, like you could try to go and (UNKNOWN) things that just wasn't right. Yeah. Is there anything that anybody always I think I already asked if what do you always install on a new computer? Are there anything, amusing that you wanna share that's like a terminal only thing that maybe people don't have access to if they only use their mouse all the time. I'm, I'll show you when I'm thinking of here is that I can share my screen 'cause I can do this now. (UNKNOWN) ridiculous. And I'm gonna begin new terms, see if I can share that. This is no, not (UNKNOWN) meaning I almost hit the wrong button, share screen. Here we go. Alright, this one is just silly, but I'm just gonna share this with you. You know, you gotta type, alas, of course, is one of the things that you type all the time, every day, and you wanna list what's in a directory. But if you type it backwards, S.L, you get the, steam locomotive, S.L. It's, I just love to just (UNKNOWN) that just to amuse myself.
Is there anything like that that you wanna share a little terminal hack that's just amusing. Well, you already exposed mine and that was C matrix. Yes. Listen, here we go (INAUDIBLE). I have not done that on this computer, so let's give it a try. That works. I think it probably will. (UNKNOWN) I haven't done this, I don't use this computer as my usual workstation. It's getting there, it's getting there. There's a little bit of some warnings here 'cause I haven't installed anything in a long time, but it's gonna get stuck. Here goes. This is very familiar to all of us (LAUGHS). See these things scrolling by, right? I've got my Raspberry Pi retro gaming like intendo thing in the other room. When it boots up, it looks just like this and it just looks like Linux. So I don't know if it's gauche to point back to, you know, my own talk, but you said something about running or really enjoying text adventure games like Zork and the like. I (UNKNOWN) last year about building a text based adventure game in Drupal and serving it up through slack.
You are the one who did that. I actually watched that video and I kind of wanna return back when I've got a little bit more time and actually play with that. So it's like a mud basically, or a move that you enjoyed that was on an old BBs system, right? Yeah. OK, so (UNKNOWN) .That's good. You figured out how to get all of the source code for the old C sources and ported to HP so that you could use it with Drupal and yet also expose that to the Slack API so people can play it with slack. That's awesome. I, my hat is off to you sir. (CROSSTALK) type C matrix while we talk about it. It works. It's not gonna help my productivity. Well, this was great, this is fun. I know that we're at the end of our time, so I'm gonna head over to the, you know, closing thing. Sure, and I'm gonna stick around here until like five or 10 more minutes and head over there myself. OK, thanks. Good to talk to everybody. Thanks, Jack. Thanks, everybody who participated. You got anything else to say, now's the time.
I was just gonna say I really enjoyed this, so this is kind of like the just the free for all discussion on all things command line. It's really, it's neat to see what everybody else does. Or at least hear about different examples yes. Thanks. I'm kind of a junky when it comes to command line stuff, I. So I mentioned that I had that IBM 5150 PC It's kinda whopping 4.77 megahertz, 8088 processor and its superfast. But I have it hooked up with I have a 10 based Ethernet card in it and it's hooked up to my router and Telnet into my Raspberry Pi with a computer that's 38 year or 40 years old. And so sometimes just for fun, I'll Telnet into the old Raspberry Pi boot up like. Retro pi or whatever, just to see it happen, you know. And I even found t,here's like somebody created an ASCII based YouTube player that plays I'll have to dig that up. But you can play a YouTube video like you're doing the Matrix screensaver here, but it tries to interpret the colors and of the video and converts them to ASCII text, so you're just watching a block of animated text that somewhat looks like an image.
Yeah, I wonder if that's built on (UNKNOWN). If you can look into that. But there's a C header library for ASCII art that you can use for video. They used to have a really cool demo for that that I saw once on non-fixed Linux. If you remember non-fixed, that was first like live CDs that you could boot off of. (UNKNOWN) to fix Windows computers all the time and blow out the super administrator password. One step Nowadays. You could get it on a USB key and go in and do the same thing. Of course, everybody has a live CD now or a live USB that's based off of the same trick. But that was early days. (UNKNOWN) from Germany. Close enough. Let's see here. I'm gonna share that. Let's go to. I've actually got a screenshot of what we did it. I posted in here. (UNKNOWN) in the chat. It's ended? I don't know, I'll stop sharing now, they can see what's in the side bar, they couldn't see that before. Here it is. That (UNKNOWN) picture is on my (UNKNOWN) column monitor. That's a picture of my dad, (CROSSTALK).
You could see his red beard there? Yeah, you sure can. But this is a, what all I did to get my computer, I love them over there, so yes, technically, I was playing YouTube on a machine with 4.77 megahertz processing power. 640 K of RAM. Ironically though, it has a four gigabyte hard drive in it because somebody created a IDE, ISE card that fits in the machine that will accept a compact flash storage device. So when the machine boots up, it takes about a minute for it to allocate free space and that four gigs of space is divided into two gigabyte, two, two gigabyte partitions because it's (UNKNOWN) and it doesn't, they can't see more than two gigs of hard drive space or something like that. Anyway, it's kind of cool. It's sitting there collecting dust right now, but every now and then I'll use Telnet on it. There's a Telnet bitcoin ticker that shows the real time price of bitcoin. And so I use it for that. It just looks cool, like steampunk or like, you know, like cyberpunk in the corner there with the Telnet stick ticker price of bitcoin just flashing on an old four color monitor.
OK. That's good, we've got a couple more minutes and we should go over to the other thing. I noticed now, now that I stopped sharing my screen, I missed all sorts of stuff in the chat, somebody shared a link to terminal, and he says, the hipster terminal, but I love it at autocomplete code highlighting good to go. It's a GitHub repository, something called pure. I was bragging about HyPer-AS the terminal. It doesn't work. I installed it on Windows and it couldn't open. I was like man I said I use it on a Mac all the time. This machine is pretty new to me. So I was like, well, I'm talking about it , I'll install it. Installed it didn't work. You did a good job. Thanks. You got some support and you got a lot of interaction, that's, this was cool. Yeah, people like to talk about their stuff. Definitely it was cool, the guy who's doing the Slack integration with the old Multiuser. I love that kind of stuff. That's just nuts. I feel like Matt Pritchard is talking but his on mute 'cause I saw his mouth moving.
