Command Line Tools Setfont, Write, and Wall

[@EdwinNoorlander]

Wall = Write-All

[@xmvziron]

I would have never imagined DT ever the phrase "yo dawg"

[@qwoolrat]

i've never heard of them before this video, thank you for explaining!

[@DistroTube]

These commands are a bit more specialized. They are not something most Linux desktop users will ever need. But it's good to know that they are there.

[@shatterstone3045]

@@DistroTube Definitely very useful! I've been looking for something like that, but couldn't find a good enough explanation. I've wanted to do a tty only challenge, where only use the tty, for a while now, but I need a good tty web browser. Any recommendations?

[@RAndrewNeal]

@@shatterstone3045 You might have found it by now, but Lynx is probably the most popular CLI web browser.

[@robsku1]

@@shatterstone3045 Yes, definitely eLinks if you want the most advanced rendering, nicest TUI, most configurable terminal based browser available. Other terminal based browsers (Lynx, Links, Links 2, w3m) lack many features. Most don't support document specific colours, but eLinks has 3 modes you can quickly switch between: 1) only use browsers default colors, 2) Use default background colour, but document specific colours for text and 3) Document specific background and font colours. Worth mentioning that it uses the closest matching colours and supports different colour modes accordingly. Default Linux console only supports 16 foreground colours and 8-background colors (8 colours for both + bright version of the color for the font when "bold" attribute is requested), so it will likely not match most sites colours closely at all. Xterm and pretty much all terminal emulators (including fbterm, which can be ran in "tty" if it's configured to use framebuffer - and on most modern distros it is by default) support 256-colours (the default 16 colours, then 6x6x6 colour RGB cube/space, followed by 24 colour grayscale ramp - notice the ramp doesn't have pure black nor brightest white as they already exist twice elsewhere (colours 0 & 15, as well as first and last colours of the 6x6x6 RGB cube[16 & 231]). The 256-colour support matches the document specific colours generally much better. It can also be configured to use "Truecolor", aka 24-bit colour space on those terminal emulators that support it (at least Konsole, KiTTY and Alacritty). Lynx doesn't support even tables - if you ever see it recommended by someone, do ask why are they recommending that specific browser today, and is it the only terminal based browser they know or have experience of. For the record, here are the text-mode/charactercell based browsers I'm aware of - in non-exact order that's close to what I consider best to worst: eLinks, Links 2, w3m, Links, Lynx & Netrik. I have not tested Netrik, but notice that it's homepage says this: _"Netrik has quite limited functionality compared to some other text mode browsers, confining its usefulnes as a generic web browser -- however, it does come with some unique features too, which often make it more convenient to use in cases where it does work. (Mostly documentation in HTML format; and also some select sites on the internet, such as certain news sites for example.)"_. Bonus entry: Technically this browser doesn't run in terminal - it runs in Emacs, and Emacs can be run from GUI as well as in terminal/console (tty). It comes readily available as part of latest GNU Emacs, and it's name is 'eww'. It's not necessarily as good as eLinks, but the fact that it's an emacs application may give it's users super powers they may like ;) * although 'tty' doesn't really mean that - tty comes from "teletype", a device consisting of printer and a keyboard basically, and the original tty's also fit into category of "dumb terminal", which is used to refer to terminals that don't support control codes that allow applications to move the cursor around and print over previous content, they just print more text after the earlier text - I'm not sure that even Lynx is usable on dumb terminal - but I'd guess that on dumb terminal it would be the most likely one to be usable in any way. What this video speaks of as 'tty's' are actually Virtual Terminals. Technically there isn't much difference between them and GUI terminal emulators. It's just that they get named as tty's, while GUI terminals (and what you get with remote SSH connections for example) are named PTY's /Pseydo-TTY's). I also once had an old 286 with dial-up program (meant for calling into BBS's mostly) connected to my Linux desktop via serial cable, and it was named ttyS0. Sorry for the long-ash reply - try elinks ;p

[@robsku1]

@@RAndrewNeal I'd love to know how true what you say about it's popularity is. On the one hand, it's certainly most often mentioned text-mode browser whenever someone asks for text-mode browser or whenever someone decides to slap together a blog post or YT video of text-mode web browsing - most of the time Lynx is the first mentioned and often only mentioned. But I wonder... It's old, and it's clumsy compared to some later competitors. Of those people who haven't tried it just as curiosity but who actually find text-mode browsers sometimes and/or in some situations useful and use them regularly, how well do they know what other browsers are available for them?I have 5 text-mode browsers (and one emacs browser - and you can run emacs in terminal as well) installed, but I really only ever use one: eLinks. elinks is so much more advanced and has so nice TUI, with almost everything being customizable that I would find it odd if someone who knows it would choose Lynx over it - unless it was for some special needs where Lynx would be better. But because Lynx is so often mentioned in comparison, I can't be sure if it isn't the most popular. Still, I would recommend elinks. Just don't bother with ECMAScript support if you compile it from source - iit may sound awesome in text-browser, but the implementation is very limited and very likely not even close to what you might think - and the trouble you'll likely have trying to get it to build with ECMAScript support is not worth it's uselessness ;)

[@Not-THAT-ChrisPratt]

Thanks so much for this! I've been looking for AGES to change the text size on my tty sessions. This was the most simple solution yet 🙂🙂

[@robsku1]

Yeah, just bear in mind that it only works because the tty'''s are configured to run in framebuffer - in other words, instead of real text-mode, your video card is in bitmap graphics mode. If you ever run into a distro where it uses text-mode, but it's still too small to read, it's probably using some SVGA textmode - traditionally PC's boot by default to 80x25 character text-mode, which should be fine to read - depending on your monitor you might actually want more. There probably are still distro's that don't install with fromebuffer configured by default. I would almost expect Debian (when you do the minimal install) to be one such thing. While you can replace the font in real text-mode, it will always have to be 8 pixels wide, and the height can only vary within limits (1-32 pixels IIRC). VGA has in fact 3 fonts built-in - to backwards compatibility with CGA and EGA. On those cards their font produced 80x25 character display, but on VGA the fonts produce following: 8x8 (CGA) = 80x50 characters, 8x14 (EGA) = 80x43 and 8x16 (VGA default) = 80x25. Not sure I'm aiming to make any point here anymore...

[@act.13.41]

Very nice to be able to send something to copy and paste in another tty

[@Trox_t]

We want more videos like this, especially server side stuff!

[@marsdrums6298]

I use setfont ter-132n whenever I do an Arch install. Makes it SO much easier to read what I type.

[@joegee2815]

Well this takes me back to 1984 when I first started using Unix...

[@anon_y_mousse]

I generally use w instead of who, less typing that way. Yeah I know, weird coming from me. You can also use write and/or echo to output messages to GUI terminal sessions. For me they're under /dev/pts/[0-9]*. Though, in that case I'm not sure why you'd want to except for fun.

[@robsku1]

For the same reason you might want to send message to "regular" tty - you might think that there's never need to send such messages to local user, but if we're talking of X Windows (and not Wayland), using a GUI terminal application doesn't mean the user is necessary local. You could have a server and a dozen X Terminals (if you don't know what X Terminal is, google it - it doesn't mean a text-terminal running on X) remotely connected to it - although today you wouldn't use an actual X Terminal, but thin clients acting as such. P.S. I would assume the 'wall' command also prints to pseudo-tty's (pty) as well as actual ones. Besides, you can''t tell apart a GUI terminal emulator or a PTY used for remote SSH shell for example... I just tested logging in with SSH, typing 'tty' and I got the following response: /dev/pts/4 :)

[@anon_y_mousse]

@@robsku1 Yeah, I get all of that and I've sent messages that way testing things out when I first learned how, but they often interfere with general terminal use and it's good manners to not interfere as well as won't be seen if they're in some GUI app at the time. If they're on the local network it's better to just get up and walk to them. I'm lazy, but not that lazy. Even if I'm in a huge complex I'll still walk 100 yards to say something to someone on the same network, and if they're not local, e-mail is better. On the other hand, if you're talking about pranking someone, then go for it, but in my experience people get annoyed by that more than not.

[@night_fiend6]

The first step to ricing my tty. Now to figure out how to change background colour and specify colour for prompt, text and commands being different.

[@AndersJackson]

Ctrl-D is end-of-file character, if not changed. So it tell the program listening to the tty that it has reached the end of the file.

[@mellowgeekstudio]

The better, safer, less prone to errors, more elegant, less confusing and less bloated way to change the console font would be to simply set in the console-setup file: CODESET="Lat15" FONTFACE="Terminus" FONTSIZE="16x32" No need to leave those settings in then hardcode the file for a totally different font! Then to apply the change just "sudo systemctl restart console-setup.service". No need to reboot the whole system!

[@Flackon]

What bloat does the other option have? Also, less prone to errors when you can just simply use the font filename, instead of guessing and splitting it into 3 variables?

[@kellingc]

Cool utils - I knew write and talk, but the other ones I didn't know of.

[@DarkGladiator]

Does anyone recommend a book covering commands such as those?

[@aquasp]

Thank you so much, loved this video!

[@LucS0042]

Wonder if you can send msgs with lolcat and cowsay involved .... :)

[@SirWolf404]

Yes you can! Just pipe cowsay or lolcat to write like so: cowsay Mooo | write user tty3

[@SirWolf404]

Thanks for a great video! This took me back to my university days! After we discovered write, we quickly found talk, and switched quickly to talk. 😁you should also cover talk! Or maybe you would class that as instant messaging 🤔 BTW write, wall and talk also work on terminals (pty/xxx).

[@topherfungus8424]

Dont forget to clean up the tty4 file you accidentally created in your home directory

[@helidrones]

To use those commands on Gentoo, you need to build sys-apps/util-linux with the tty-helpers use flag.

[@solidhyrax]

What I do to increase size of fonts in tty is do 'setfont -d' and it just increases the size.

[@Andrath]

You should look into ntalk, chat on terminals, even across networks.

[@gonzalob.7432]

hey dt, I've a question, hope it gets collected for hey dt. At some point you mentioned that you don't work in IT. How did you end up so well versed in linux?

[@robsku1]

I noticed you pressed Ctrl-C in the TTY that received and displayed the message to get the prompt back. That's unnecessary because you're still in the prompt - only it doesn't look like it because stuff was printed between the prompt and your cursor. You could just continue by entering a command right there, but because we often want clarity (especially when making a video) you could simply press Enter to get a new prompt. However sometimes such messages are printed in the middle of TUI application like Irssi, mc, etc. and they mess up the view - when that happens you usually can signal the application to repaint the terminal by using Ctrl-L. And if you''re inside GNU screen session you might want to use Ctrl-A l (small L) or Ctrl-A Ctrl-L - tmux has same functionality, but I don't know it's default keybindings. Also that "echo ... > tty4" redirected the output to a file named "tty4" in the directory you are in - Linux is not DOS or Windows ;) (nor OS/2 - though OS/2 at least was pretty good). P.S. I see that this has already been said, but I remembered something amusing. I heard of the 'wall' command before I knew about 'write' command, and having gotten used to command names that were sometimes words, but most often obscure sounding abbreviations of a word or words - and I couldn't figure out why it had such a stupid name: wall. I actually came up with a "theory" that the name came out of an idea of some kind of public wall of messages (so everyone sees them). Then I learned of "write" and facepalmed so bad my other eye still remains blind ;P Write All :D

[@Eddthompson]

what about 'talk' is that no longer around? I used to do that at library to friends. I forget how I would see who was on network when I was on some one else's network like the library. I remember using it on my home network, me Redhat and father on Nextstep that I built for him. I would send him stuff on talk. It was almost a chat channel.

[@zaneearldufour]

You've probably made a video about this, but I've learned about a lot of commands from trying GitHub Copilot recently. I get the ethical + privacy concerns, but it's been a really cool way to learn new stuff while writing bash scripts

[@sumankumardas3273]

my betterlockscreen is not stacking in suspend or sleep mode it is crashing and spit me back to my old stage!! how can i solve it. I'm running the command " systemctl enable betterlockscreen@$USER --now "

[@AleksyGrabovski]

Hi DT, how to write message to a terminal emulator (like xterm)?

[@robsku1]

The very same way - only, instead of name like "tty3" (/dev/tty3) they get named like pts/5 (/dev/pts/5).

[@AleksyGrabovski]

@@robsku1 Thanks, mate!

[@robsku1]

@@AleksyGrabovski no problem - as for figuring out more than user and tty name, like whether it's a GUI (or framebuffer, like fbterm) terminal emulator, a PTY for window inside GNU Screen, or tmux, is a harder task - but I believe it's possible with combination of right GNU CLI tools. If you want, I'll gladly look into it - I'm interested as well, but need a bit extra motivation! 😁

[@guilherme5094]

Nice👍

[@JohnWasinger]

8:24 rm tty4 You just created a new file in your current working directory.

[@yrncollo]

Awesome

[@HappyFunNorm]

Don't forget to combine wall with banner

[@champfisk5613]

Yo dawg! 😆

[@cjveeneman]

can always tell an ubuntu user ... sudo everthing. Become root, do what you need then drop root.

[@Maik.iptoux]

Why so hard change to the console font? This his hilarious. Why you not just use "sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup" There you can select it in graphical menu (cli) the font and size you want.

[@mellowgeekstudio]

Indeed, but that would only work on Debian based systems. But one could simply change these variables on that file instead of hardcoding the font file for a simpler, safer way to do this: CODESET="Lat15" FONTFACE="Terminus" FONTSIZE="16x32" then "sudo systemctl restart console-setup.service" instead of reboot to apply changes.

[@hichemchouadria4134]

The first 👍

[@DistroTube]

Confirmed.

[@fabricio4794]

Comand Line Sucks...QT i love you...

[@darukutsu]

Right cmd sucks embrace terminal

[@fabricio4794]

@@darukutsu i use Terminal on OpenSUSE and Terminal Still sucks..

[@grimslade0]

You say that now... But just you wait until you find yourself coming home from a grueling day in the mines, just to catch QT being down-streamed by your neighbour's brother's stepson.

[@DarkGladiator]

CLI is one of the reasons I switched to linux