post type
You have a specific problem. Here's how to diagnose and resolve it.
Your shell prompt, ls output, or a TUI app shows the wrong colors, garbled characters, or no colors at all specifically inside Windows Terminal connected to WSL — even though the exact same shell config looks fine over plain SSH.
A command in the middle of a pipeline suddenly dies with a 'Broken pipe' error, sometimes only when piped into head or a similar early-exiting command. This is a specific, well-defined signal, not a random failure.
Commands from an earlier session seem to vanish, or history from multiple open terminals overwrites itself instead of combining. Here's how history file writing actually works, and the specific settings that fix each symptom.
A keyboard shortcut that works fine outside tmux does something completely different — or nothing at all — once you're inside a tmux session. Here's how the prefix key and multiple layers of keybindings actually interact.
TUI applications render broken or clipped over SSH, or your terminal doesn't rewrap correctly after resizing the window. The remote shell has a stale idea of your terminal's dimensions — here's how that actually gets synced.
Your carefully configured prompt suddenly shows broken characters, missing icons, or throws errors on every new shell after updating a theme or framework. Here's how to isolate whether it's a font, config, or version issue.
You just installed a tool, its binary is definitely on disk, but your shell insists it doesn't exist. This is almost always a PATH problem, and there are only a few actual explanations for it.
Opening a new terminal tab takes a visibly annoying second or two before you get a prompt. Here's how to actually find which specific line in your config is responsible, rather than guessing.
You accidentally catted a binary file and now your terminal shows strange characters, wrong colors, or doesn't echo what you type. The shell is fine — the terminal's display state is what actually broke.
You deleted gigabytes of files inside a WSL distro, but your Windows C: drive shows no space freed up at all. This is expected dynamic-VHD behavior, not a bug — and it has a specific, direct fix.