# New zine: The Secret Rules of the Terminal

DevFeed: [New zine: The Secret Rules of the Terminal](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/new-zine-the-secret-rules-of-the-terminal-21121.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://jvns.ca/blog/2025/06/24/new-zine--the-secret-rules-of-the-terminal/>)

Author: Julia Evans

Published: 2025-06-26T00:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Julia Evans](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/julia-evans.md>)

Topics: [Terminal](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/terminal.md>), [Shell](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/shell.md>), [Command-line interface](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/cli.md>), [Operating system](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/operating-system.md>), [Software](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/software.md>)

Tags: [blog](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/blog.md>), [deep-dive](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/deep-dive.md>), [how-to](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/how-to.md>), [internals](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/internals.md>), [software](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/software.md>), [terminal](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/terminal.md>), [tips-and-tricks](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/tips-and-tricks.md>)

## AI overview

The article announces a zine about the terminal and explains why terminal behavior can feel inconsistent or difficult to investigate. It introduces the terminal as a combination of a terminal emulator, operating system, shell, core utilities, and other programs, and presents the zine as a guide to their interactions, common conventions, and practical usage tips.

## Source excerpt

Hello! After many months of writing deep dive blog posts about the terminal, on Tuesday I released a new zine called "The Secret Rules of the Terminal"! You can get it for $12 here: https://wizardzines.com/zines/terminal, or get an 15-pack of all my zines here. Here's the cover: the table of contents Here's the table of contents: why the terminal? I've been using the terminal every day for 20 years but even though I'm very confident in the terminal, I've always had a bit of an uneasy feeling about it. Usually things work fine, but sometimes something goes wrong and it just feels like investigating it is impossible, or at least like it would open up a huge can of worms. So I started trying to write down a list of weird problems I've run into in terminal and I realized that the terminal has a lot of tiny inconsistencies like: sometimes you can use the arrow keys to move around, but sometimes pressing the arrow keys just prints ^[[D sometimes you can use the mouse to select text, but sometimes you can't sometimes your commands get saved to a history when you run them, and sometimes they don't some shells let you use the up arrow to see the previous command, and some don't If you use the terminal daily for 10 or 20 years, even if you don't understand exactly why these things happen, you'll probably build an intuition for them. But having an intuition for them isn't the same as understanding why they happen. When writing this zine I actually had to do a lot of work to figure out exactly what was happening in the terminal to be able to talk about how to reason about it. the rules aren't written down anywhere It turns out that the "rules" for how the terminal works (how do you edit a command you type in? how do you quit a program? how do you fix your colours?) are extremely hard to fully understand, because "the terminal" is actually made of many different pieces of software (your terminal emulator, your operating system, your shell, the core utilities like grep, and every