The shell prompt is a lie

Every shell session in every blog post has been edited. Mine included.

What gets cut

$ ./build/bin/pulpmesh build ~/Sites/notes --out=/tmp/site
wrote 12 pages

What actually happened was a typo, a missing directory, a rebuild, and then
that. Nobody wants the first three, so out they go. Fine. But two habits keep
the edit honest.

Habit one: paste real output

$ ./build/bin/pulpmesh build ~/Sites/notes --out=/tmp/site
pulpmesh: no base_url in _readme.md; skipping rss.xml
wrote 12 pages

The warning is real, it is what a reader will see, and cutting it means the
first thing they experience is a surprise.

Habit two: show the failure too

$ ./build/bin/pulpmesh build ~/Sites/notes
pulpmesh: two files publish to frontier-model.html
  0010-frontier-model.md
  2026-06-20-frontier-model.md
$ echo $?
1

An error message with an exit code is more useful than three paragraphs about
what could go wrong.

Habit three: mark the elisions

$ ls _site | head -4
404.html
index.html
frontier-model.html
rss.xml
...

head and a trailing ... are honest. Silently deleting the middle of a
listing is not.

The one I break

I still align output columns by hand when the paste comes out ragged. I have
made my peace with it.