Just roll up and open hackertyper.net in fullscreen. βThis is going to be a bigger problem than I thoughtβ¦β
this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2025
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Then after five minutes of furious typing you say ....
I'M IN
Thanks for this...
Back in the early 2010s I was sitting on a long train ride, and opened my hacker-sticker-covered netbook and started doing some terminal stuff in a console window; nothing particularly remarkable or exciting-looking, just navigating directories and moving some files around. An older lady sitting next to me glanced over, her eyes got wide, and she got up and moved to a seat further away from me.
I still think about that moment a lot.
There was a guy who got approached by a flight attendant for doing calculus on a plane. Some other passenger had reported him for doing something in Arabic, which we all know could hijack and take down the plane!
To be fair, he was almost certainly using Arabic numerals.
/s, obvs
And it looked like they were counting down!
/s
I set my terminal to black text on white when I'm in public.
I don't want to have to explain what I'm doing to an impatient functionally illiterate backwater cop.
The real question is why were you moving files with the terminal emulator?
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I used to write html, JS, and CSS on long flights and saw some side eye looks, but then Iβd have to test load the website I was working on for mom jeans and the jig was up.
I feel like using the command line should really be a basic skill taught in school. That would be way more worthwhile than teaching people how to use like microsoft office
Most teachers are already glad when their students graduate with functional literacy and without bullet holes.
Tell me youβre from the USA without telling me youβre from the USA.
Okay, but, like... No? How delusional do you have to be to think something you never have to touch in Windows, macOS, iOS, or Android (and probably less and less going forward in desktop Linux, an already extremely niche OS) is more important than learning how to use a word processor, make presentations, or work with spreadsheets? (Microsoft Office specifically is used because it's the industry standard as part of a vicious cycle, but not the school's fault or problem). Do you, like, exist in the real world outside a very specific industry/set of interests?
As a computer science student, I haven't met anyone that didn't use terminal on Mac. I am heavily biased.
Also, I think ping is actually very useful for a normal user. Not nearly as useful as (any) office software, but still.
I know you already pointed out your sample is heavily biased, but to reiterate: macOS users you know predominantly from computer science and adjacent engineering fields are a very skewed sample. You can say that sprinkling terminal usage into a middle school computer literacy class is worthwhile, and I might even agree. But to treat it as anything more than something used by enthusiasts, programmers, IT professionals, scientists (on a very basic level that can be learned in 10 minutes), teenagers trying to look badass, and the one-in-a-million frustrated "normie" user who falls into it through some troubleshooting/game modding/etc. tutorial simply isn't realistic.
Regarding ping: what good is it going to do a normal user who doesn't understand basic networking? It can rarely tell me basic useful information, like that my DNS is fucked up (can't get to websites but can ping). For normal users it'll just tell them the Internet isn't working, which they probably already figured out, but how do they resolve it? Pictured: a normal user who can use ping figuring out their Internet isn't working. To make something like ping meaningfully useful, you need to teach them basic Layer 3 concepts too, which is fine, but that's not a terminal skill β that's networking skills with a trivial terminal command stapled on.
Scammers use the terminal to trick people into thinking they've been hacked, so that's one reason to at least know it's not magic.
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Well, I'll settle for basic computer literacy as I still run into college students without a working knowledge of file systems... buuuut one would argue it's worth covering the basic building blocks of how all this works.
I've heard similar arguments for teaching people the fundamentals of how data works too, as we have data harvested from us at alarming rates and knowledge is power.
The terminal feels like such a haven for me, for its responsiveness. Windows gets slower and slower with each update. Even my Linux DEs are slow now because Iβm hardware poor. The terminal is the only app that stays ahead of my typing.
Oof. That must be a single core laptop from 2010 or something, which if true, that sucks.
I have a 13 year old computer around here that had no problems with LMDE6 when last I fired it up. It was relatively high spec when new which takes some of the edge off, but I never had an input lag problem anywhere except maybe badly-written websites.
Just how limited is your computer?
"How slow is it?" My desktop is so slow, it comes with a prompt that says 'Execute now to guarantee completion before Christmas.'
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It is genuinely shocking how computer illiterate marketing people tend to be.
Thereβs a reason they have marketing jobs.
They are good at social manipulation and compartmentalization.
The programmers are similarly morally bankrupt, as they're implementing the enshitification of the worst people, the business people who make the shitty decisions both implement.
Programmers can also create non-enshittified solutions in their off time and release it publicly for free and many do. What good can a marketer do for the world?
Fucking nothing. Marketing is just another word for propaganda. Fuck em.
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Well, I dont want to lie for a salary, so im also bad at marketing.
I had a friend who wasn't very technical who had some issue where he couldn't boot into his OS (Windows) and bought a new computer, but wanted the files off the old computer. So he asked me for help. I remember bringing a Knoppix live CD (remember Knoppix?) And when I was there, I realized I had a severe lack of general networking equipment. (I didn't have a switch, so I couldn't plug both computers into the network so they could communicate with each other and the internet.)
So I started up the old computer in Knoppix, plugged it into the network, and installed a bunch of networking packages like a DHCP server and such. And then I used the Ethernet cable to plug the two computers into each other, letting the Knoppix box give the new Windows machine its IP. And then I installed Putty on the Windows machine and used it to SCP the files from the old machine to the new one.
The whole thing went way smoother than I'd have expected, never having attempted that before. But I felt like such a hacker that day. Lol.
I remember going through tech school 20 years ago and them telling you you need a crossover cable with you at all times for just this type of situation. I think in the 20 years I have used one once.
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sudo apt-get Gud.
Apt-get is deprecated.
May I suggest
git clone git@github.com:notro/gud.git
apt-get isn't deprecated...
If you run apt search x | grep y, you'll even get a warning against using apt in scripts
apt-get isn't going away, apt is just a nicer frontend for interactive use
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Joke aside...
Who has not reached that "just say yes so they shut up"-point with some people?
I find the terminal very quiet and cozy compared to desktop apps.
I have probably an unhealthy amount of nvim and tmux shortcuts.
I've been trying to swap over to Linux and I don't like using the Terminal because I have zero memory retention for literally anything that isn't Weird Al songs
Good thing about nodern terminal is that you don't need to remember much. It's all autocomplete this days, everything has help and there are helpers all over. As a fellow memory challenged, I love it
Terminal commands and Weird Al lyrics might have more in common than you think.
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The text isn't projecting onto her face. She can't be a hacker.
3 terminal apps that got me hooked:
mednafen (emulating a PS1 on a net potato with 2gb of ram and an atom processor at a playable framerate was just magic to me)
moc (epically minimal music player that just feels right)
nano (I wrote a series of short stories using it while listening to music on moc, honestly the most zen-like experience I've ever had)
Bonus: radion (an online radio player mostly written in bash I discovered in the early days of Lemmy)
btop really impresses people... Too bad nobody has any interest looking at what I'm doing
The best part of Hannah Montana Linux is that there is no terminal. You just stick your dick into the interface hole, or ofc you can jam the interface stick inside you, and it knows what you want done without you having to do anything.
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This happend to me just yesterday. I pulled up a terminal with python to use it as a basic calculator (don't judging, I was just adding numbers) and my class mate looks over and thinks I'm some kind of hacker for that
I'm a designer, I don't know a single designer - from school or work - who doesn't know what the terminal is. Sure I don't really know how to use it but that's because I grew up on Win 7 and later, where GUIs ruled. Most designers are pretty tech literate, it's half the difference between us and fine arts folk.
The thing about the terminal you don't need to know everything. Just a few basic commands get you moving and it kinda clicks. It is pretty optional with Linux most of the time. But I love using it is fast af for file management.
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