Yesterday I got myself into tmux and I love it!
tmux is a terminal multiplexer. It lets you switch easily between several programs in one terminal, detach them (they keep running in the background) and reattach them to a different terminal.
I’ve been using Zellij for several months prior to this. Which I must thank for getting me introduced to the world of terminal multiplexers. However I’ve been running into several issues with it, that got me looking for an alternative:
At the moment, Kamal doesn’t support IPv6 out of the box. Meaning your containers won’t be able to reach IPv6 hosts at all. IPv6 support is expanding, and on some of my projects, I need such connectivity. Taking Kamal for a ride, I’ve run into this issue and had to solve it.
Modern EC2 instances on AWS boot without invoking initramfs by default. So if you want to do things like repartition your disk, where the root partition is, you’ll be scratching your head why your initramfs hooks aren’t loading.
Working with the official AWS S3 CLI, as well as tools like s5cmd I quickly realized they aren’t optimized for resource constrained systems, rather more towards uploading as fast as possible and in parallel. This is great for most use cases, but not when you want to minimize the impact on the system, like during frequent backup operations and on a system with half a gig of memory for example.
The UNIX command line tools is something that just keeps giving. Within web development I often find myself wanting to quickly debug a URL, see whether it’s alive or what the response is. Often I do not want to download the whole content (a large file for example). Before I learned the following, I would use Chromes Developer Tools. That is until I learned how to do it more efficiently and quicker with good old curl:
I was reading The Art of Command Line (great stuff) and tried the SSH configuration tips. With the below config I noticed considerable speedup in various SSH and Git related workflows. My ~/.ssh/config now includes:
On some of the servers I work with, due to cheap hard drives in software RAID configuration, I’ve found that bundle install can be extremely slow (take half an hour to complete). This obviously became unacceptable during deploys.
Often the changes I do to my working copy are small and I don’t want to waste time with explaining what it is. So I’ve created a bash alias to do a commit with a generic message for me:
It’s about time I got myself familiar with some of the core UNIX command line tools. No matter how good the GUI applications look like and work, when using command line alternatives the stuff gets done faster and it’s less prone to error.