@b0rk Anyone who isn't still learning things 15 or more years into their career—even “basic” things (these are not basic)—is so deep in a rut that they can no longer see out of it.

@b0rk 💯 normal and appreciated, I knew you were going to knock that whole terminal piece out of the park. Well played!

@b0rk wow! people love to make people feel bad on purpose! thanks for doing what you do to normalize actually needing to learn :)

@b0rk I feel like it's unlikely that anyone was trying, struggling for fifteen years to learn them. It's more like they never got around to it. And very likely didn't need that specific piece of knowledge for their day to day.

@b0rk haha yeah I have been doing this a lot longer than 15 years and this is the first time I have really _thought_ about how terminals work

one thing I don't get is: If ^W isn't handled by readline (or friends), what *is* doing it? How do backspace and word-backspace work?

How... does character entry work at all??

@b0rk working in software requires people to be lifelong learners. Thanks for setting a good example.

@b0rk there are literally millions of basic things no one can learn all of them no matter how many years they have

@b0rk I’ve been coding for 40 years. I still learn new things every day. And forget other ones every day. We’re people, not books.

@b0rk right? That sort of commentary serves no purpose. And there's always new stuff to learn.

There's probably even a better way to do my go-to readline use case, one I haven't discovered yet:

```
read -s PASS
export PASS
```

@b0rk I've been using variants of the unix command line for 25 years and I'm still stumbling into new things. Nobody knows *everything*.

@b0rk i too was born naked, screaming and confused. and i still ask my partner if 12 past meridiem is noon or midnight.

it always and will never not confuse me.

@b0rk There are lots of 'basic' things I will never learn. Assuming otherwise seems presumptive at best, basically!

@b0rk I just found out yesterday there are terminal extensions to get key up events in the terminal. I naively thought for the last 20 years those were already there. https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/keyboard-protocol/

@b0rk there is something particularly juvenile about people assuming there is one particular order or traversal for how people should learn things – that if someone else doesn’t know a particular bit they are BEHIND or BELOW or BASIC.

it’s NORMAL that we all encounter the staggering diversity of technical details at different times and stages and it doesn’t mean something fundamental about your place in the hiearchy.

@b0rk Comments like that (which I have heard over and over and over all the way back to my baby web dev days making my first website in 2004) only end up ensuring that overly sensitive autodidacts such as myself write off programming as a viable hobby/career forever…

@b0rk and not remember all the details from manuals and documentation. But it’s easy to be a smartass on the web writing silly comments

@b0rk there is something a little funny to me about how i was (and effectively now am) going to reply to this about how while i am very seasoned with computers and running infrastructure i struggled with git for a long time and so this post resonated with me

but your pinned toot is about your zine “how git works”!!! which i think i will now have to check out

@b0rk you're an internet treasure Julia, thanks for doing what u do.

You're like that kid in class that when a teacher explains something complex in a horrible way raises their hand and says "actually I didn't get any of that" and prompts every other student (who don't feel confident enough to admit they didn't understand) to lower their guard and go "yeah no, please explain that again".

Publicly admitting ignorance is so powerful! Nothing that you don't know already of course :D

@b0rk

WTF? If I don't use some so-called basic thing and therefore I don't need to learn it, so what? Am I learning or working under the person who judges me for their opinion to matter at all?

@b0rk That's nonsense, *nix is a complex beast and nobody can be reasonably expected to know everything even after using it for a long time. I've been using it for 24 years and I am still learning stuff including several things from your blog post, such as reverse-i-search being available in all readline programs, and the existence of rlwrap! So thank you for that.

I don't like having to memorize lots of different keybinds so I prefer to use vi mode in bash/zsh but this isn't always possible.

@b0rk Please do. It's very comforting.

@b0rk I always point these things out to my readers-

@b0rk Thank you.

I very much appreciate your content, even when it is a topic I know well. Your research is always very thorough, and you do an excellent job of explaining things in an easy to understand form.

There have been a number of times when I've found myself adjusting how I explain things to others because of that, not because I didn't know the topic well, but because I didn't know how to make it relatable to someone who doesn't.

"Basic" is relative, and that's okay.

@b0rk imagine being so committed to lifelong learning that after 15 years you still have the curiosity to discover new things!

@b0rk 💯 That comment is so 🤦‍♀️. I use a lot of things every day and do not have the time to become an expert on every single one of them, use a tiny fraction of what is possible with readline, bash, (n)vim, … That makes your approach so interesting, because you choose a topic and then do: “Well, I maybe somehow know this exists, maybe even use some of it often, but now I really want to know what's going on and maybe write a zine on it.”

@b0rk I only know ctrl-K and regular navigation with home/end/arrow keys, and searching with ctrl-R.

The rest of it may come later. Or not.

@b0rk I hate comments like these because clearly you've been able to do (well-documented) very cool stuff without this "basic" knowledge... so even if it's a "basic" skill, clearly it's not absolutely necessary... 🤷

@b0rk spud, you're somebody I have *for years* looked up to for technical stuff and to hear you say this means an awful lot.

@b0rk I can't believe it can take a person 15 years to stumble across documentation of such basic functionality.
Documentation needs to get better.

@b0rk Ive been doing Unix for 35 years now and only just learned from you about Ctrl-U and Ctrl-W in the tty driver.

@b0rk it took me almost 20 years to learn to knot my shoes properly. I learned faster to code than to lace my shoes.

@b0rk So say we all! 🫡

@b0rk Absolutely this. I had that very experience with folks in the (Free)BSD community recently when I said that the current UX of setting up services and timed processes is just subpar at the moment. Of course their point was that piles of shell scripts would be so much simpler than tools just doing their job. 🙃 Never be ashamed of not knowing something "basic". I can call anything I want "basic" or "simple", but that will hardly mean anything; it's just a POV (or simply disparaging).

@b0rk Heh. It took me almost double that time of using UNIX shells to learn about Ctrl-R - I mostly made do with !! and friends, and ^search^replace until then...

@b0rk There's also no one order for learning things. There's plenty of "basic" things that I'll just never come across in my career and so will never know.

@b0rk We all ignore things : https://mastodon.gougere.fr/@bortzmeyer/112752554284473629

@b0rk These people probably never did even 0.0001 % of what you are doing to teach people about computing. Ignore these dumb fools and keep on the good work!

@b0rk People who make this sort of comment should really, I don’t know, just shut up??

Their attitude is just rude and supremely unproductive. Not sure what they’re after, but if they want to be liked and respected, they picked the wrong strategy.

(I’m phrasing this as politely as I can.)

@b0rk I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here, but with how large and diverse the computer industry is as a topic of things to learn it should be expected for everyone to "not know" a "basic" thing. It's like getting upset that someone doesn't know every single word in an unabridged dictionary.

@b0rk we never stop learning, your work helps new engineers and us old ones alike. Love your work, it's both fabulous and essential across all levels of engineers 🥰

@b0rk i still have a readline cheatsheet bookmarked because typing text in a terminal is hard

@b0rk in my humble opinion, anything further than "type command line and press enter" is fifty shades of arcane

@b0rk Yes, they really are. It took me about 10 years of Linux CLI usage to finally learn that there's a better alternative to tapping the "up" key a 100 times to find a previous command.

@b0rk I re-learn basic awk/sed syntax every time I use it.

There's no shame in not knowing or not remembering something (especially when you don't typically need it).

@b0rk this hubris is fascinating. i'm using the unices for 30 years now, and i just learned about rlwrap today, thanks to you.

(and learned from you about a bunch of other tools on another occasion, for which i'm going always be grateful)

@b0rk I saw this comment and was pretty appalled/amused at the idiocy of it. Some people...

@b0rk I would say:

"I CAN'T BELIEVE THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO FEEL THE NEED TO MAKE COMMENTS LIKE THAT AND ARE SO IGNORANT ABOUT HOW LEARNING WORKS" ...

... but sadly, I completely can believe it.

You do fabulous work, and while mostly I stand on the side-lines, and I'm sure you already know that you are doing amazing things, I just thought I'd say so explicitly.

You do amazing things.

Thank you.

@b0rk in the same vein: it's taken me 40 years to learn basic surgical procedures (removing splinters from my skin), I just don't get that much practice - or have that much interest...

People have different areas of expertise and interest. I am extremely unlikely to ever use the "basic readline commands" in either a professional or personal capacity as I'm not a programmer.

So, yeah, the "I can't believe it took so long comments" are ridiculous.

@b0rk I think your zines are like the best embodiment of the sentiment in this xkcd so keep on keeping on please and thank you!

https://xkcd.com/1053/

@b0rk I learned about control-e in terminal to move to the end of the line after decades of using control-a to get to the beginning of the line. 🤷🏻

@b0rk you should take those comments and turn them into clickbait headlines advertising your zines:

"YOU WON'T BELIEVE IT TOOK HER 15 YEARS TO LEARN THESE BASIC READLINE COMMANDS"

@b0rk Yeah… I was thisyear years old when I learned about “Ctrl-A” to go to the start of the line (having used Unixes for 3 decades). I should really try to internalise the other ones.

@b0rk And the thing is, it's not like you thought about it for 15 years! Maybe you only ever saw it one time, in passing, as you were trying to figure out why something *else* wasn't working.

Who the hell are these people who read the entire documentation, cover to cover, exercising every part, figuring out every possible utility, and only THEN start using it? Wild.

@b0rk I've been doing this for 10 years longer than *that* and there was news to me in this article too. Thanks for all the great information and thanks for not letting these asinine commenters stop you, modeling this sort of openness to new information is super important.

(I accidentally discovered the *particular* fact in question early on by accident, because I'm a long-time Emacs user, and muscle-memory just had me trying those navigation keys…)

@b0rk -- Truth. I like to say you may learn the basics quickly, but it will take YEARS to master the basics.

@b0rk

@gvwilson

It's also such shortsightedness. Unless they know all the "basic things" that anyone anywhere considers basic and thus approach omniscience

@b0rk it's taken me since the early 1990s to learn enough vi commands to write on one side of an index card

@b0rk I 100% do not understand readline and avoid all things about it. What an unhelpful comment

@b0rk It’s entirely normal to learn new “basic” things with Linux/Unix/POSIX command line usage because there is so much lurking right under the surface, and people come to it by learning different workable subsets.
I had a big leap forward in my efficiency almost 20y into my career due entirely to having a new senior sysadmin join our team. We worked in radically different styles; just seeing his work in his style added a pile of little things to my knowledge that I've used ever since.

@b0rk Those people are behaving like jerks. Instead, they should be saying, "Congratulations! You're one of today's lucky 10,000!" https://m.xkcd.com/1053/

@b0rk I am 45 and there's a number of things I've never gotten round to learning: like spelling "beauraucracy" or whatever that word is for stuff with too much paperwork. Or which side port and starboard are (I did briefly know this, but I didn't use it so I forgot). Or how to use that Linux "ip" command, almost all the network config I do happens on BSD machines. I'll learn things when I need to. Only worth learning things sooner if they're interesting or something!

@b0rk great attitude! I’ve been doing this a long time, but I still looked up how to use `ping` today just to be sure. I’m glad I know how to look for answers instead of pretending like I know everything. 😇

@b0rk I've been a professional Python programmer for 15 years. I still look up "file.ope n()" every time. (Or is it "file.Open()")

@b0rk I've been using terminals for close to that long and only knew Ctrl-R so /shrug

@b0rk i'd go even further, and say that it's perfectly ok for us to get worse at things because #agism #ableism

Respect for your achievement and thank you for sharing it. You are obviously smart, and it's totally cool that you're not arrogant about it 🙇‍♀️

Consider me a new fan.

@b0rk
it took me 15 years to learn to recognize mansplaining comments, it will probably took me another 15 years to learn to shut up before making them.

@b0rk Human beings are the animals who need the longest time to become adult. And regarding these comments some will never be. Now tell me about 15 years ...

@b0rk
"Can't believe" to me spells lack of imagination and understanding.
@clarebee

@b0rk considering that you're not using Emacs, it's only natural that you wouldn't pick up on those key bindings.

Ancient Greeks had a saying “Only everybody knows everything”.

@b0rk if it weren't for that blog post of yours, it would have taken me 15 years too! I didn't know about them 😭
anyway, you really improved my life 😆

@b0rk Yes, this! I mean, just think of how many basic things there are that one could learn.

@b0rk amazing stuff, having typed command for 30 odd years, often badly, you’ve cleared up some mysteries for me - thank you!

@b0rk Why would I learn something basic when I can use the brain cells for learning non-basic things and look up basic and infrequently used stuff in a zine when I need to, instead?

@b0rk

I've been a professional dev for about 15 years now. A few years ago, I failed a job interview because I was not good enough at designing a "basic" database schema. I'm a bit better at it now, but not much (most of the schemas I've been designing still are very very basic)

The field of computer science is HUGE - you can't be expected to know everything - and that's ok !

1/2

@b0rk Very well said. 'Basic' is subjective and I can't believe some people still like to make others feel bad for learning something instead of celebrating them.

@b0rk the older I get, the more it feels like I'm still learning “basic” things. What's basic for one person may not be for another and vice versa, depending on each one's learning journey. It's good to normalize this!

@b0rk And nobody talking about the cool things they've learnt, because they're too chickenshit to admit it took them 15 years, is one of the reasons it sometimes takes us 15 years to learn things.

@b0rk

I started using Linux in 2005. I had a printed book back then. It covered readline, emacs and vi modes, so I was aware of these shortcuts and how to find them. But it wasn’t until few years ago that I made a conscious effort to list few that seemed most useful and try to use them every day. There are 5 or 6 that stuck in my muscle memory.

You are not alone.

@b0rk It's more of an "I haven't bothered to learn it before", anyway, isn't it? 😉

I can say that I've been Linux-first for about 15y. I've taught Git and Bash. And I still learn something from following you. Thanks!

@b0rk if you need more such quotes. I am using linux since 2000, mostly focused on commandlines, managed lots of website and online services, self host stuff, still cant use emacs and tmux, still learning new things about screen and vim.