naom3 [she/her]
Lmfao whoever told you arch was idiot proof was wrong. Like, it’s not gentoo but it’s not always straightforward either. I was actually talking to someone once about installing arch and I was like “it was actually pretty easy. Well, I did have to debug a couple kernel module conflicts…” lol
man and man bash for stuff about the shell itself are your gateways to most of the other arcane secrets. Just knowing the basics and knowing how to look stuff up is enough to do basically anything
man bash
It’s not just on arch! It comes with most distros, and I’m sure it’s available on bsd too, though maybe not out of the box since it’s a gnu thing. I know it at least used to be available on mac because I used it on a macbook lol. At school I even use it on the windows machines in wsl and there’s probably a native version too, but you cannot make me use powershell lol. It’s also pretty easy to just compile from source on whatever system you have
I think the guide probably assumes you already know about ^C, but as for the utility, a good way to learn about any terminal program is its man page. Just type man [program] and it’ll bring up the man page which explains how to use it. Just press / to search the page, q (or ^C) to close it, and h to bring up the help menu. Seriously, man is essential and I use it all the time, and it’s generally your first go-to for a quick summary of how to use a program. When I was first learning how to use the terminal I literally just typed man bash a lot lol
Edit: also, typically [program] --help or even -h will print a brief list of options for use with that command. The bash help command can also be used for the actual bash commands (like alias) which typically don’t have man pages (unless you count bash’s) as opposed to the external programs
Edit2: I should say that none of this is specific to arch, it’s just general unix stuff but I think the arch installation guide assumes you know it already
ctrl-C in the terminal, unless it’s being overridden, sends SIGINT to the currently running program which typically causes it to close. It’s really useful for closing programs when you don’t know how to do it otherwise (like I don’t know if ping even has another way to close it) and when you use it on the command line it just discards what you’ve typed and drops you to a new prompt. Although text editors usually override it (like on nano (best editor) it just reports your cursor position and doesn’t send the SIGTERM). ctrl-Z also sends SIGTSTP which pauses the currently running program and moves it to the background and if you want to use it with nano (you do, it’s really convenient) you can just edit your nanorc file to enable suspension and map ^Z to suspend
Side note, but a really common exit command is q, which is probably what the utility wanted
I’m on cipralex (lexapro), an SSRI. It helps with the anxiety and is also good for my mood(SSRI’s are most commonly used as antidepressants actually) but I also experience a lot of emotional “flattening” and sometimes insomnia. I still have a lot of social anxiety but the dose I’m at seems to be an effective compromise between being functional and dealing with the side effects