Posts tagged terminal

Sometimes you just happen to cat a binary file and it just messes up your terminal output and all can see and type is garbage.

Normally here you’d just give up and reopen your terminal but here’s another solution: Just type the command below:

 echo -e \\033c

All you’re doing is sending an ESC(033 is the octal version of the ASCII control key “ESC”) + a letter “c” to the console, which is a VT100 command to reset the terminal to its default settings. If you’re curious about other VT100 commands, take a look at this page. You can send them all using

echo -e 

followed by the the codes in ASCII. This works in any VT100 compatible terminal which means that you’re safe to use it on your Linux or Mac machine.

Edit: As some people said in the comments and at G+, you can just use the “reset” command, which is actually doing the above and some more.

To read more about the reset command, check the man pages here.

One of the best plugins I’ve found for vim is CommandT.  It lets you open files in a very speedy and intuitive way, making it very simple to search files and open them in tabs, splits or vertical splits. Or so it should be. On OS X, opening a file on a new split doesn’t really work. You should be able to do it using the Ctrl-S shorcut but it just doesn’t work.

Today I decided to go after this problem. Looking around the net, I found an article explaining the reason:

 I found a related tip indicating that by default, Terminal.app reserves Ctrl-S for old-fashioned XON/XOFF flow control.

Ok, so the Terminal app doesn’t allow us to use Ctrl-S because it’s a reserved shortcut. What to do?

Simple, just add the lines below in your ~/.bashrc

stty -ixon -ixoff

It will disable the above behavior and free Ctrl-S and Ctrl-Q for use in terminal apps!

Reminder: Just adding that to your bashrc won’t change the settings in the currently open terminal windows. Type the command above on the terminal so you can have the benefits right now, or reopen all your sessions.

Recently I gave up on screen for tmux. From the tmux homepage:

tmux is a terminal multiplexer: it enables a number of terminals (or windows), each running a separate program, to be created, accessed, and controlled from a single screen. tmux may be detached from a screen and continue running in the background, then later reattached.

Tmux is screen on steroids. You can customize just everything, from starting applications automatically to the background color to the key bindings. The multi-pane temrinal thing is pretty cool but sometimes you just wanna focus and work in just one fullscreen pane while keeping the ability to switch back to the multi-pane mode.

Originally there are no bindings for (or a simple command) to maximize and restore the size of a pane.

After some googling, I found a perfect solution for the problem and I decided to share it with everyone:

unbind + 

bind + new-window -d -n tmux-zoom 'clear && echo TMUX ZOOM && read' \; swap-pane -s tmux-zoom.0 \; select-window -t tmux-zoom 

unbind - 

bind - last-window \; swap-pane -s tmux-zoom.0 \; kill-window -t tmux-zoom

These will bind the “+” and “-” for maximizing and restoring, respectively. 

My own tmux.conf can be found on github.

(Source: superuser.com)