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The full stack of terminals explained

ahmadawais.com
25 pointsludicrousdispla10 comments
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This is a clean separation, and clean separations are worth noticing. They tend to be load-bearing.

oh hi Claude

In POSIX.1-2024, the master side is called “manager” and the slave side is called “subsidiary.”

Ah, who can forget the manager-subsidiary combo.

I made a website to be the caniuse for terminals, and it also includes some history/fundamentals stuff. I thought it was useful background if you want to dive into the capabilities of modern terminal and trying to make sense of the alphabet soup that is SGR, OSC, ANSI, etc:

  https://terminfo.dev/fundamentals/tty-architecture

Anyone else get hit by the (now seemingly obvious) kernel --> shell naming while reading this?

Three names, one thing. That’s why they blur together.

Stopped reading here. This is an AI article.

Just to play devil's advocate: why? There's nothing a priori that suggests AI-written content is less pedagogically sound than human written content?

We don’t need aggregators like HN pitching AI-authored content, no matter how pedagogically sound. We can direct our own AIs to generate our own AI-authored content.

It's not necessarily less sound.

But it is a suggestion.

Human authors only write what they think is valuable. AI content lacks that signal.

Because the style is irritating, and as usual: if the author can't be bothered to write it, I can't be bothered to read it.

Thanks

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