It's sometimes useful to re-read documentation of the software you use regularly. I, for one, tend to take the easiest path and use just the bare minimum features. Take for example the magnificent little Unix program called
screen. I have been using it for — I don't remember how long — at least 10 years. The basic commands and key bindings are second nature for me, but though I've known about window splitting, I've never actually used it. Now I do.
What's more, there are often gems like this in Unixy applications and utilities:
nethack on|off Changes the kind of error messages used by screen. When you are familiar with the game "nethack", you may enjoy the nethack-style messages which will often blur the facts a little, but are much funnier to read. Anyway, standard messages often tend to be unclear as well. This option is only available if screen was compiled with the NETHACK flag defined. The default setting is then determined by the presence of the environment variable $NETHACKOPTIONS.
There are loads of weird old options that dealt with wacky terminals, but most of the stuff is still relevant. (Well, maybe dealing with wacky terminals is still relevant, beats me.)
[permalink] [1 comment] 03.03.2005, 21:45
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Posted by Mark Eichin at 04.03.2005, 06:18
screen and tcsh are both man pages that deserve a re-read about once a year. "nethack on" has been in there for a long time (it's a little less fun than it used to be because screen has gotten much more robust - so you don't see "The Dungeon Collapses - more -" anymore :-), but the fact that you can just run screen instead of kermit to manage serial ports directly is both new and directly useful (at least to me - on a mac, it's the "easy" way to talk over bluetooth to my phone...)(and I switched from tcsh to bash ages ago, bash doesn't get the kind of features that inspire this - which is part of the reason I switched :-)