Vitanuova for 2003 October 13 (entry 1)

Changing habits

If you could find and read old shell history files of mine, you would see many enormous strings of commands something like this:

w
who
df
finger
w
w
ls -l
ls
df
ls -l
ls
ps x
w
w
df
ls -l
w
w
who
ls -l
finger
df
ps x

I would habitually run simple status-reporting commands whenever I had nothing else to do. As a result, I would gradually absorb information about the state of the system, getting a deeper sense of what was going on, and quickly noticing certain kinds of problems if they arose.

When I used GUIs, I would do a somewhat similar thing -- I would constantly pull down all the menus and submenus of each GUI application, and then close them. Or I would do a "Help About". You could call it a nervous habit. Some people watching me found it very confusing or distracting. I thought it was a great and altogether natural way to get to know the computer better.

I seem to remember that Neal Stephenson wrote something about computer users who like to receive status information constantly from their computers and other computer users who find it frightening or disconcerting (because they assume that something is wrong, or lack context to interpret the status information to decide whether something is wrong). I just re-read much of "In the Beginning Was the Command Line" in the hope of finding this passage, but it didn't turn up.

I argued to various people that constantly playing with your computer and trying to get it to elicit status messages or at least to disclose interface elements would give you a much deeper familiarity with it -- that it was a good way of learning even while you were doing something else, or while you were doing nothing at all. And it was a good way of getting closer to the machine. ("It is only by amusing oneself that one can learn." Cited by Kasner and Newman.)

I noticed that, although I am still very active whenever I use a computer, I rarely type "w", "who", "finger", or "ls" unless I specifically need the information provided by these commands. (I still type "df" and "ps" and "ps x".) I wondered what had changed to alter my Unix habits so significantly.

I thought of four relevant changes:

1. The shared-access system I started to use most had more than one screenful of simultaneous users. So typing "w" or "who" or "finger" became annoying, because I would only get to see a tiny fraction of the total activity (and it was in some sense a random fraction rather than interesting fraction). "w" is much more comprehensive on a lightly-used system than on a heavily-used system. "w | less" takes far too long and is not consistent with browsing for idle curiosity.
2. My home directory and most subdirectories grew to have more than one screenful of files. Thus, just as the output of "w" would scroll off the screen, the output of "ls -l" would scroll off the screen.
3. I started to read weblogs and frequently-updating news sites, where I would find frequently-updating information by following my "linkers" (what many other people call a "blogroll") or by telling my browser to reload. This provides a different kind of interesting "idle" activity to compete with simply examining local machine state.
4. I started to use screen, so that I was less often at a shell prompt and more often inside an application like mutt or lynx (because I didn't have to quit one application in order to start another application, as I did before I started using screen).

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