We're back after a (planned) lengthy hiatus! In this instalment, Bart teaches us how to protect our secrets while working in the Terminal. Secrets can include passwords, API keys, and any other sensitive information you'd like to protect. Without the tools Bart teaches us, any secrets you type into the Terminal will be in your history file in plain text, and with AI, possibly hoovered up as training data.

You'll hear me say the last episode was in 2022, but it was actually 2020.

You can find Bart's tutorial shownotes over at ttt.bartificer.net/...

You can download the free Taming the Terminal book at podfeet.com/tttbook. All of the versions are up to date with the new chapter, except Apple Books. As of 18 December 2025, the one in Apple Books is "in review" with the new chapter. Hopefully, by the time you look for it, they will have deemed that chapter worthy of inclusion. I just noticed that it's available in Apple Books in 51 countries! The book has 4.9 stars with 30 reviews!

In 2017 on Taming the Terminal installment 37 of n, Bart taught us about SSH agents and the advantages of using a passphrase to further protect your SSH keys. In the intervening four years, things have changed a bit in macOS, so we decided to do a supplemental update to installment 37. We review a bit about what SSH Keys are (from installment 30) and then discuss how much easier and cleaner things are on macOS with the clean integration of your identity, passphrase and Apple's Keychain.

You can find the replaced show notes for TTT 37 at ttt.bartificer.net/...

If you've downloaded the Taming the Terminal book, please go to podfeet.com/tttbook to get a fresh version.

In this episode of Taming the Terminal, Bart winds up our series within a series all about the Terminal command TMUX. In this final piece he teaches us first how to string commands together to create the TMUX sessions we want with the screens split and the processes running in each pane as we like them. After teaching us how to string them together he shows us how to make a little script file we can run so that we can automatically open up our TMUX sessions exactly the way we like them.

This will be the last of our Taming the Terminal episodes for a while, but we'll be back after macOS Big Sur ships and is stabilized. In macOS Catalina the default shell was changed from bash to zsh and it does bring some changes to things we learned earlier in the series but it seems prudent to wait till we're over this big hump getting into Big Sur.

You can find Bart's tutorial shownotes over at ttt.bartificer.net/...

Don't forget, you can download the Taming the Terminal book at podfeet.com/tttbook. The book will be updated with this instalment shortly.