What 1,600 Terminal Users Say Frustrates Them Most

Last month a survey asked terminal users, "What's the most frustrating thing about using the terminal for you?" With 1,600 responses collected over a few days on Mastodon and Twitter, the answers were grouped into categories. The methodology is informal — respondents were whoever happened to see the posts — but the respondents themselves are not novices: 40% have used the terminal for over 21 years, and 95% for at least 4 years.

Below are the most common frustrations, with response counts.

Remembering Syntax (115)

The top frustration by a wide margin is memory load. Users reported struggling to recall:

  • syntax for CLI tools like awk, jq, sed
  • redirect syntax
  • keyboard shortcuts for tmux, text editing, and more
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 Between Systems Is Hard (91)

Moving between home and work machines, or over SSH, exposes differences users find disruptive:

  • OS-specific keyboard shortcuts, especially Linux vs. Mac
  • missing preferred editors ("no vim" or "only vim")
  • different versions of the same command, like macOS grep vs. GNU grep
  • missing tab completion
  • unfamiliar shells ("the subtle differences between zsh and bash")
  • inconsistent pager behavior within the same system, e.g. git diff pagers vs. others
I got used to fish and vi mode which are not available when I ssh into servers, containers.

Color Configuration (85)

Color problems take many forms:

  • program colors unreadable on light backgrounds
  • difficulty finding and applying a consistent scheme across apps
  • colors breaking through nested SSH/tmux
  • defaults that users dislike
  • not wanting color and struggling to disable it
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 configuration ever again).

Keyboard Shortcuts (84)

Half of these comments center on one issue: on Linux and Windows, the terminal's copy/paste shortcuts differ from the rest of the OS. Other complaints include:

  • Ctrl-W in a browser-based terminal closing the window
  • the terminal supporting only a limited shortcut set — no Ctrl-Shift-, no Super, no Hyper, and many ctrl- combos like Ctrl-, being impossible
  • the OS hijacking a shortcut (macOS uses Ctrl+left arrow by default)
  • emacs issues in the terminal
  • backspace not working (2 responses)

Other Copy and Paste Issues (75)

Beyond differing shortcuts, respondents cited:

  • copying over SSH
  • conflicting copy/paste mechanisms in tmux vs. the terminal emulator
  • multiple clipboards — system, vim, Linux "middle click," tmux — and the chore of synchronizing them
  • random spaces added when copying from the terminal
  • pasted multiline commands running immediately
  • wanting mouse-free text copying

Discoverability (55)

Users rarely find features or tools on their own. One comment summarized the feeling:

How difficult it is to learn independently. Most of what I know is an assorted collection of stuff I've been told by random people over the years.

Steep Learning Curve (44)

Many comments were general complaints about difficulty, but some reflected plateauing or being overwhelmed:

After 15 years of using it, I'm not much faster than using it than I was 5 or maybe even 10 years ago.
That I know I could make my life easier by learning more about the shortcuts and commands and configuring the terminal but I don't spend the time because it feels overwhelming.

Shell History (42)

Specific complaints about history include:

  • history not shared between terminal tabs (16)
  • buffers that are too short (4)
  • history lost when tabs are restored or the terminal crashes
  • search skills being unclear
It wasted a lot of time until I figured it out and still annoys me that "history" on zsh has such a small buffer; I have to type "history 0" to get any useful length of history.

Bad Documentation (37)

Three criticisms dominate: opaque docs, man pages without examples, and programs with no man page at all.

Finding good examples and docs. Man pages often not enough, have to wade through stack overflow

Scrollback (36)

Scrollback problems arise when:

  • verbose programs blow away history
  • resizing the terminal, especially narrowing it, breaks rewrapping because output was formatted to the old width
  • timestamps are absent
  • background GUI programs clutter the output of others
When resizing the terminal (in particular: making it narrower) leads to broken rewrapping of the scrollback content because the commands formatted their output based on the terminal window width.

"It Feels Outdated" (33)

Legacy constraints frustrate users, who end up learning esoteric implementation details:

Most of the legacy cruft, it would be great to have a green field implementation of the CLI interface.

Shell Scripting (32)

POSIX shell scripting drew general complaints. Users found it difficult, but also feared that switching to a less standard language — fish, nushell — creates new problems.

Shell scripting. My tolerance to ditch a shell script and go to a scripting language is pretty low. It's just too messy and powerful. Screwing up can be costly so I don't even bother.

Additional Frustrations

Several issues came up at least ten times:

  • (31) inconsistent command-line argument conventions (-h, help, or --help)
  • (24) keeping dotfiles in sync across machines
  • (23) performance, such as slow shell startup
  • (20) window management across tmux panes, terminal tabs, and windows
  • (17) fear of running something dangerous and being unable to undo or diagnose it
  • (16) terminfo problems when trying new terminals over SSH
  • (16) lack of image support like sixel
  • (15) SSH issues, including losing progress when connections drop
  • (15) tmux/screen problems, like poor integration with the terminal emulator
  • (15) typos and slow typing
  • (13) terminal state corruption from Ctrl-S or cat-ing a binary
  • (12) quoting and escaping in the shell
  • (11) Windows/PowerShell-specific issues

Mostly Satisfied (122)

Not everyone had a complaint. 122 responses were variations of "nothing really," including:

Think I've found work arounds for most/all frustrations

Looking across categories, several pairs seem related: remembering syntax and history overlap when the thing to remember is a past command, discoverability issues feed the steep learning curve, and "switching systems is hard" connects to "it feels outdated" — tools that haven't changed in decades are quirky, but they're reliably present on every machine, which makes them hard to abandon.