What Is A TTY And How To Use It

What is a tty and how do I use it? I've been asked this question a few times in recent weeks, so I thought I would make a brief video discussing this.

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[hirocode]

I have been a rather silent subscriber of yours for a couple of months now, but I want to tell you that I really enjoy these new "noob-friendly" tutorials that you are doing. I always learn something I didn't know before from them. Thank you very much DT.

[michaelberger]

dude.... you just made me feel my real age of 51.... i used a real tty system back in grade school.... over 30 years ago.... i use my tty commands religiously in my linux lite.... cause i find it quicker to do command line than dicking with looking for icons.... remember my generation grew up with no gui.... untill at least till ms windows version 2.0....

[bertnijhof]

I'm old, so I used a real ASR 33 (tty) for work and editing my program source on a timesharing system, shared between say 100 programmers using say 3 x 10 ASR-33's). The ASR 33 worked at a whopping 10 chars/sec, fortunately 1 year later we got a synchronous display terminal (24 lines of 80 chars) and say 16 displays shared one 9600 bps line (1200 chars/sec). After completing the program source or its change, you started a batch job for compiling and linking the program. If you're lucky the batch job would run within an hour. If you're unlucky you got the results back next morning. The computer had 512 KB of fast core memory (1 MHz) and 2 MB of slow core memory (400 KHz), but it had a real 32 bits CPU (Philips P1400) and not a fake 32 bits calculating at 2 x 16 bits (P1200) or 4 x 8 bits (P1100). Those were the days

By the way that hit song by Mary Hopkins is from the same time :)

[Karla_Finch-Cluff]

Thank you so much for this!
Side note: I appreciate how clear your audio is on every one of your videos and how CONSISTENT it is! [I think you mentioned the audio in the last video of yours I watched] These short videos are just what I was looking for to learn something new, and I learn from the commenters of your videos, thanks for doing what you do!

[MrVoidfull]

Great video. You forgot to mention one of the most common uses of tty when it comes to server admin duties: using the tty to login as a different user while not logging out of your current active user. Comes in real handy when doing system admin tasks

[pyrokamileon]

What is a TTY? Is seriously a question that I've had for the longest time but never bothered looking into. Thank you very much for making this video 😁👍🏽

[thetastefultoastie]

If I had a nickle for every Raspberry Pi blog I've seen with instructions to the effect of:
Step 1. log in
Step 2. type 'startx'
Step 3. open the terminal emulator and type these commands...

[jordananderson]

I just watched a recent video from you where you have decided to start updating in TTY because of some recent issues with updates in the GUI. I love that there was an old video I could look at to learn more about TTY from you. Thanks DT!

[lsatenstein]

The image of the mechanical printer and keyboard reminds me of my starting out in IT. I used those machines. They were very noisy and reliable.

[MarioKL]

I dunno about you, but I pronounce TTY the same way we call our first source of food when we come into this world.

[hammerheadcorvette]

3:47 For some reason, I love TTY3. It's calming.

[Zellonous]

This is very powerful for multitasking. Even a noob like me find joy and amusement doing all sorts of cool things without a graphical user interface

[Soulskinner]

(I'll watch full video later, it's kinda time to go to sleep)
I remember my first experience with TTY (Virtual Terminals). I've read about it's hotkeys and... immediately pressed it. XD
It would be nice, but I've switched there before reading about how to switch back to DE.

Fun fact: at first, TTYs was used as UNIX terminals, because they was relatively cheap. But this "cheap" cost was ~1200$. XD

[CarlosMilan]

chvt: AWESOME. Didn't knew that one. That will come handy as I try to run Manjaro on a Macbook pro with touchbar

[TomGrubbe]

Been using Unix/linux for 25 years. Didn't know any of this. Thanks for the education!

[dkosmari]

Worth mentioning: tty12, if your distro set up journal/syslog redirection. You don't get a login prompt, just the system logs output; useful if the graphical desktop is unresponsive.
Also useful on ttys: the magic SysRq menu. Hold Alt, and keep holding it; press SysRq key. You're now in the Linux kernel's emergency menu, as long as you keep holding Alt. Press H to see the help message, showing what commands are available. Most people just memorize the mnemonic "REISUB", or just "EISUB". The "R" steals the keys processing from Xorg, or any other process that thinks they own the keyboard. "E" and "I" to send a terminate signal to all processes, so they can stop gracefully, followed by a kill signal to end any one that didn't terminate voluntarily. "S" to sync all buffered data to storage devices; "U" to unmount all filesystems and remount them as read-only; and "B" to reboot. This is how you "gracefully" reboot an unresponsive Linux system, minimizing data loss and filesystem corruption.

[dojocode]

I recently fixed my display manager using tty in my arch setup with i3wm.

[thgreenshaman]

Hello from Invercargill, NZ!
Loving your videos DT. Keep em coming man!

[mylinuxgr]

Great video. Another tty use is when we connect to a remote computer via ssh.

[pctlc]

Very well explained video thanks Derek!! I didn't know about chvt :)