Bash, Zsh, sh, tcsh, and the TUI tools built on top of them — prompts, scripting, multiplexers, and terminal troubleshooting.
You accidentally catted a binary file and now your terminal shows strange characters, wrong colors, or doesn't echo what you type. The shell is fine — the terminal's display state is what actually broke.
Commands from an earlier session seem to vanish, or history from multiple open terminals overwrites itself instead of combining. Here's how history file writing actually works, and the specific settings that fix each symptom.
Opening a new terminal tab takes a visibly annoying second or two before you get a prompt. Here's how to actually find which specific line in your config is responsible, rather than guessing.
Your shell prompt, ls output, or a TUI app shows the wrong colors, garbled characters, or no colors at all specifically inside Windows Terminal connected to WSL — even though the exact same shell config looks fine over plain SSH.
Every shell in daily use today — Bash, Zsh, tcsh, fish — descends from a lineage that started with a genuinely minimal 1971 command interpreter, branching twice into distinct, still-visible family trees.
A complete walkthrough of the two genuinely essential shell scripting debugging tools — one that traces exactly what a script actually executes, and one that catches whole categories of bugs before the script ever runs.
A complete walkthrough setting up fzf — a general-purpose fuzzy finder that plugs into history search, file finding, and practically any list-based shell workflow you can pipe text into.
A complete walkthrough writing shell scripts that run correctly under any POSIX-compliant shell — not just whichever one happens to be installed on your own development machine.
A complete walkthrough of GNU screen — older and less feature-rich than tmux, but still genuinely useful, and often already pre-installed on systems where tmux isn't.
A complete walkthrough installing Starship — a fast, shell-agnostic prompt that works identically across Bash, Zsh, and fish — and configuring exactly which information it shows.