A few weeks ago I ran a terminal survey (you can read the results here) and at the end I asked:

What’s the most frustrating thing about using the terminal for you?

1600 people answered, and I decided to spend a few days categorizing all the
responses. Along the way I learned that classifying qualitative data is not
easy but I gave it my best shot. I ended up building a custom
tool to make it faster to categorize
everything.

As with all of my surveys the methodology isn’t particularly scientific. I just
posted the survey to Mastodon and Twitter, ran it for a couple of days, and got
answers from whoever happened to see it and felt like responding.

Here are the top categories of frustrations!

I think it’s worth keeping in mind while reading these comments that

• 40% of people answering this survey have been using the terminal for 21+ years
• 95% of people answering the survey have been using the terminal for at least 4 years

These comments aren’t coming from total beginners.

Here are the categories of frustrations! The number in brackets is the number
of people with that frustration. I’m mostly writing this up for myself because
I’m trying to write a zine about the terminal and I wanted to get a sense for
what people are having trouble with.

remembering syntax (115)

People talked about struggles remembering:

• the syntax for CLI tools like awk, jq, sed, etc
• the syntax for redirects
• keyboard shortcuts for tmux, text editing, etc

One example comment:

There are just so many little “trivia” details to remember for full
functionality. Even after all these years I’ll sometimes forget where it’s 2
or 1 for stderr, or forget which is which for > and >>.

switching terminals is hard (91)

People talked about struggling with switching systems (for example home/work
computer or when SSHing) and running into:

• OS differences in keyboard shortcuts (like Linux vs Mac)
• systems which don’t have their preferred text editor (“no vim” or “only vim”)
• different versions of the same command (like Mac OS grep vs GNU grep)
• no tab completion
• a shell they aren’t used to (“the subtle differences between zsh and bash”)

as well as differences inside the same system like pagers being not consistent
with each other (git diff pagers, other pagers).

One example comment:

I got used to fish and vi mode which are not available when I ssh into
servers, containers.

color (85)

Lots of problems with color, like:

• programs setting colors that are unreadable with a light background color
• finding a colorscheme they like (and getting it to work consistently across different apps)
• color not working inside several layers of SSH/tmux/etc
• not liking the defaults
• not wanting color at all and struggling to turn it off

This comment felt relatable to me:

Getting my terminal theme configured in a reasonable way between the terminal
emulator and fish (I did this years ago and remember it being tedious and
fiddly and now feel like I’m locked into my current theme because it works
and I dread touching any of that configurati