DEV Community

A Guide To Loving Your Terminal

Lazar on August 13, 2019

*Congratulations, you are a proud terminal owner! * When I first switched to Linux, I avoided my terminal like the plague. Now I don't know how I ...

Read full post

Mitch Stanley • Aug 13 '19

Another bonus for the && syntax is that if the first command fails it will not run the second command.

This is useful if the second command relies on the first commands result (Like with your example updating packages).

If they're two separate commands that don't rely on each other then you can use ; instead.

Samuel Abreu • Aug 14 '19

Also || is a valuable tool on scripts, to exit or inform an error:

do_something_amazing || echo “nope” && exit 1

Mithil Poojary • Jun 10 '20

I use that with gcc.
gcc filename.c && ./a.out

If compilation failed, it won't run the program.

Robin Palotai • Aug 13 '19

+1: commit your dotfiles to a repo so it's easy to restore on an other machine.

Eventually I would like to write about the collection of terminal tools I use and love (like grep, sed, tmux, multitail, ncdu, ranger etc). Follow me if you want to read one day.

Holy-Elie Scaïde • Aug 13 '19

I pretty spend my coding life between the terminal and the browser (which is the only things keeping me from going full minimal). I use Neovim as a text editor and even if you can launch commands within it, it' often faster for me to pause it using ctrl-z and resume it afterward with fg. I usually have both Ranger and Neovim open and I can be pretty fast with them (keyboard only). Another thing that helps is using zsh and oh-my-zsh with a few plugins enabled (git, yarn, laravel5, z) which boost my productivity to the roof

maxdevjs • Feb 10 '20

Once I found a fancy function to handle ctrl-z behaviour. As seems that you use zsh and in a similar way, here it is:

fancy-ctrl-z () {
  if [[ $#BUFFER -eq 0 ]]; then
    BUFFER="fg"
    zle accept-line
  else
    zle push-input
    zle clear-screen
  fi
}
zle -N fancy-ctrl-z
bindkey '^Z' fancy-ctrl-z

Lazar • Aug 13 '19

Funny you talk about going full minimal! Same thing with me, the browser is the only one tying me down as well... or else I would just have a full cli system. lol

Chad Windham • Aug 13 '19

+1 for changing terminal font lol, whenever I set up a computer the first thing I do is change the default size of my terminal (making it much bigger), increase the font size to make things easier to read, and change the font (for the same reason)

scorp13 • Aug 14 '19

A couple of years ago I wrote a small cheat sheet on some terminal commands for myself

Lvcäs • Aug 13 '19

Amazing post!

Another very useful command is "man"! When you have no idea about all the capabilities of a certain program it shows the manual of it.

Mayank Yadav • Aug 15 '19

+1 Set the background color to translucent, so you can see what's happening at the window beneath it.
+1 install 'nautilus', helps you open the terminal from any folder location.

Tu Van Nguyen • Apr 24 '20

Yup, being able to use the terminal is like a super power for productivity. And it's amazing how many other tools you can suddenly use once you master the terminal.

Maxime Gaston • Aug 14 '19

Actually, nearly anyone using ohmyzsh with a powerline font theme changed his terminal fonts 😉