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6 posts
A complete walkthrough Haiku's Terminal application and its bash-based shell — familiar to anyone with Unix experience, with a few Haiku-specific tools worth knowing about.
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.
'Terminal' and 'shell' get used interchangeably constantly, but they're genuinely separate programs with separate jobs — one draws characters on screen and manages input, the other interprets commands.
Full-screen terminal applications like htop and vim don't just print text — they take over the entire screen, redraw parts of it selectively, and read your keystrokes one at a time. Here's the layer that makes that possible.
TUI applications render broken or clipped over SSH, or your terminal doesn't rewrap correctly after resizing the window. The remote shell has a stale idea of your terminal's dimensions — here's how that actually gets synced.
A practical set of real, working defaults commands to unlock hidden macOS settings, plus how to find and safely revert any customization yourself.