My experience as a new comer to tilde.town.
A guide and travelogue that I hope will help out somebody else some day.
The first thing you’ve got to do is connect to tilde.town.
I suggest you start with the Official SSH How To.
Additional reading on this step:
So if you are shelling into town a lot now, you might be typing out a pretty long command each time you want to connect.
ssh -i ~/.ssh/tilde.town YOURUSERNAME@tilde.townYou can radically reduce the amount of typing you do with a little bit of set-up. Wouldn’t you much rather be able to type the following?
ssh tildeOf course you would.
Do this.
Create a file on your own computer in ~/.ssh called config
Add the following to ~/.ssh/config
Host tilde
HostName tilde.town
User YOURUSERNAME
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/tilde.townand now you can simply ssh tilde whenever you want to join your happy little tilde town :D
If you’re like me and are using a laptop that you move around from place to place, or for some other reason have a sketchy connection, you may have noticed that your ssh session hangs, drops, disconnects, freezes, etc.
If that’s the case, consider using mosh, the mobile shell.
Remote terminal application that allows roaming
Check out the site. It’s mostly as simple as a brew install mosh.
And then from now on, you will connect with mosh tilde. And you’ll suddenly be able to maintain a connection while roaming, switching from network to network, etc. And life will be better. Skies more blue, and the sun brighter. Your smile will be whiter and your pets more well behaved.
So you’re connected. That’s great. Now what?
Here are the first places you should look for tips on getting started.
Read the motd for some tips. (type motd)
Also see the Public Service Announcements post on bbj for some neat utilities and scripts.
Read (and edit!) the wiki: http://tilde.town/wiki
The w command will let you see who all is logged in and what they’re working on, you little snooper you.
bbj is our bulletin board
irc: chat will open up an instance of weechat, an IRC client, and connect you to #tildetown, the main channel. You can also connect to the tildeverse irc network on localhost port something something. (TODO)
Mail: if you want to mail somebody, you can use alpine. a more feature rich/steeper learning curve option is mutt.
Feels: record your feels and check in on your neighbors with feels.
wall - don’t use wall :( it’s spammy and it messes up the way my screen is drawn. Note: if you get walled, then try pressing Ctrl-L to redraw your screen.
tron
asciifarm
botany
holodeck
I’ve collected a list of other town related goodies that you can look at: ~dozens/tilde-scripts.txt (EDIT: this list is probably out of date, and has been superceded by the excellent town command.)
Configuration and tips-n-tricks
Things you might consider using to maximize your experience in tilde.town
tmux is a terminal multiplexer. It’s kind of like a window manager for your terminal, allowing multiple tabs and persistant sessions.
Alternatives include screen and byobu.
Resources:
There are other tildes in the “tildeverse” and there are other kindred/related projects and communties.