🔗

Yesterday I met ~caasi/, but do you know how I met him? I met him using the write command, which looks something like:

write username

And it simply drops whatever you enter in stdin directly to the other person's terminal. Not very pretty. Specially not pretty when you are using vim and someone drops you a message.

I decided that using mail would be better for communication, so I could do:

sendmail username

and then type my message the same way I would do with write, but this time the other guy could read it asynchronously, when he wanted to, using the mail tool.

Of course, using write is stil the best way to drop a short burst of text very fast to someone else. But for now on I will use it just to send the message

cym

It means Check Your Mail!

As soon as I finish my current project, I'll see if it's possible to write a tool similiar to write, but it would just drop a BEL character and then you could proceed to check your mail (most terminals flash when they receive a BEL). This tool would be called poke.