Taming the Terminal

Taming the Terminal teaches the command line through conversation rather than lecture. It is built on a set of written tutorials by Bart Bouchats, and each installment, numbered in an open-ended 'of n' style, talks one of them through with Allison Sheridan. The roles are distinct. Bart explains; Allison tries things. She pastes his commands into her terminal as they go and reports what appears, or what fails to. Those snags do a lot of the teaching. In one session her echo of a variable prints nothing at all, and the two of them trace the cause back through the show notes together. Bart shares a method along the way: run a command with no arguments first, because what it does on its own hints at the arguments it expects. He has firm rules too, among them always putting quotes around variables. He is also frank about how hard it is to put a lesson in order, at one point calling it a chicken-and-egg problem. The material is hands-on. tmux gets sustained attention: naming sessions so that tmux ls returns something readable, detaching with Control-B and then D, and splitting windows and chaining commands so a layout builds itself. Episode titles also cover screen and cron, and a supplemental installment on SSH agents explains how a passphrase-protected key can stay secure without being retyped constantly. The Mac is the reference point throughout, and Bart does not hide his mild crankiness when Apple goes its own way. He notes that Apple ships its own tweaked OpenSSH, which he gives as the reason the SSH agent lesson was so long in coming. He also describes the Unix mailbox every user has on the system, which Apple's Mail app no longer reads. Linux comes up in passing too, as the point of comparison for Apple's OpenSSH. Several installments first aired as part of Chit Chat Across the Pond, which Allison hosts, and the two mention working together on Programming by Stealth as well. The show leaves the rough edges of that history in. One intro admits that the episode was misnumbered on air, with Bart going along with the mistake. A conversation recorded in 2025 starts with the two of them noting it had been since 2022. Episodes close by pointing back to the written tutorials, so the text version is always there to follow or revisit.