I haven't totally sold myself yet on this "what are the secret rules of the terminal?” framing but it feels like a reasonable way to talk about how, even though “the terminal” is a lot of separate things working together, it "feels" like a cohesive environment that has a lot of rules that you can generally expect to be true.

Some of those rules are Unchangeable Facts and some of them are just Vague Social Rules but understanding the vague social rules is just as important as knowing The Facts.

an example of a "social rule" in the terminal is that if you have a noninteractive program, you can generally expect that `Ctrl-C` will stop it, programs can do whatever they want but it would just be kind of rude for a noninteractive program to not respect `Ctrl-C`

(there are different and more complicated social expectations around how to quit interactive programs)

another example of a "social rule" is that at an interactive prompt you should expect `Ctrl-W` to delete the last word, this is weird because depending on the _kind_ of program, the exact mechanism for how `Ctrl-W` will delete the last word might change, but I think it would be generally considered rude if a program with an interactive prompt treated `Ctrl-W` in a different way

(text editors are an exception though and generally are allowed to handle text editing however they please)

another social rule is that if a program is writing its stdout to a file or pipe, it's expected to turn off colour codes so that users don't end up looking at output like this:

ESC[1;33massets.jsESC[0m

(as far as I know there is almost nothing enforcing this behaviour except that users will be unhappy if you don't do it)

i forgot to put “please don’t explain how terminal keybindings work to me” on this thread and i’m regretting it, anyway, please don’t, i wrote 4000 words about it if anyone wants a deep dive
https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/10/31/ascii-control-characters/

https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/07/08/readline/