Jacob Brokaw

May 14, 2026

Terminal Slang

Last Friday my teammate was sharing his screen on a TV in a meeting room, showing his terminal. He ran a command which returned an error, then typed "bruh" as a response.

> java --jar program.jar     # Typo in command args
Unrecognized option: --jar
Error: Could not create the Java Virtual Machine.
Error: A fatal exception has occurred. Program will exit

> bruh

He wasn't actually running java, but it illustrates the situation. I don't remember if it was me or someone else, but we said bruh should help you figure out what went wrong. Everyone broke out in laughter, and the ideas just kept on coming. What about yolo as an alias for sudo? Or yeet for rm -r?

Introducing Gen ZSH, my personal collection of silly shell functions using Gen Z slang.
https://github.com/jacobbrokaw/gen-zsh

It took maybe an hour of my Sunday evening to put this together. Most of that time was writing the documentation. Creating little things is always such a fun, refreshing activity. It's like arts & crafts for programmers!

By the way, the project is open-source, so feel free to make some pull requests if you have any additions!


 

Jacob Brokaw
jacobbrokaw.com