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Comment by guard-of-terra | Hacker News Reader

Every time I've touched BSD I screamed in Agony.

It usually has non-working vi (beeping at the sight of arrow keys), ancient shell, colourless ls and other commands lacking about every other key I throw into them.

I understand that BSD has traditions to do exactly that that you will now defend, but those traditions are not unlike muslim africa that tell them to circumcise young girls or kill for blasphemy. Traditions are baaad, mkay? Not gonna get any new users with traditions. Admit that getting new users is not any of your priority and you lost because of that.

Technically BSDs were always interesting, but you can't bring yourself to use this awkward tool.

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PLEASE tell me you didn't just compare monochrome output from "ls" with female genital mutilation. Please.

No, he made an analogy relating the reason to have monochrome ls and ancient vi/bash in BSD to the reason female genital mutilation occurs.

Not exactly classy, arguable, but not out of the line either.

I've never experienced any of these problems. vi always works for me and has done since about 1997. The shell is usually a bourne derivative - no problems there. Colours - you really don't need these in ls.

Coloured "ls" is one of those things that is absolutely entirely useless if you actually know how to use ls.

I find all BSD derivatives to be professionally documented, extremely reliable and with very few hidden surprises.

Compared to digging through GNU info and the utter bloat that most of the GNU toolchain has become[1] and favourite system tool dependency hell replacement of the hour (upstart, udev, dbus etc) it's absolute bliss.

[1] *BSD distributions are all slowly phasing out GNU toolchain due to these problems.

Documentation will be extra nice if I could bring myself to actually use BSDs, which I can't.

You're lucky, vi didn't work for me. Perhaps my terminal is to blame, but it works with Linux.

> Coloured "ls" is one of those things that is absolutely entirely useless if you actually know how to use ls.

Knowing how to use non-colored ls is way down my priority list now that colored ls is widely available, much the same way learning more about ed is not a high priority for me.

> GNU info

GNU info is much more useful than man pages, which are, at best, memory aides for people who already know the software and, at worst, confusing masses of trivia that beg to be broken up into multiple pages.

> bloat

In my experience, 'bloat' can be defined as "any feature I'm not using at the moment" or, if I'm feeling cranky, "any feature that I feel allows people stupider than me to be productive using my favorite tool". It is a snarl term of the first water, with no value except to express a negative emotion.

    Knowing how to use non-colored ls is way down my
    priority list now that colored ls is widely available

Fluency with permissions is fundamental knowledge for a competent unix operator. How many times have you worked with someone who doesn't really get it, but works around it by running everything as root or marking everything as 777? Fluency with permission goes hand-in-hand with habitual use of the long-list usage of ls. And if you do that, colours give you nothing. (although they do look pretty, and that's not a bad thing, and I leave them on for some configurations)

    GNU info is much more useful than man pages, which are,
    at best, memory aides for people who already know the
    software and, at worst, confusing masses of trivia that
    beg to be broken up into multiple pages.

That may be true on linux, but not universal.

A clear advantages to BSD is that tooling man pages are produced by a single team. They're more consistent and generally of a higher quality than on linux. In addition, tools tend to do one and only one thing, which promotes use of pipes and scripts rather than obscure tool features.

> Fluency with permissions is fundamental knowledge for a competent unix operator.

This has precisely nothing to do with whether ls colors its output or not.

> A clear advantages to BSD is that tooling man pages are produced by a single team.

They're still too short to really introduce any tool complex enough to need documentation.

> In addition, tools tend to do one and only one thing, which promotes use of pipes and scripts rather than obscure tool features.

BSD has find. I know it does.

If colored "ls" had been standard from the early days, I'd bet that people would be praising how useful it is, and wondering how can you live without it. But many *nixes still don't have it and people that made a life using them get into this "get off my lawn" attitude.

I can read the output of "ls" just fine without color. I use systems without colored "ls" daily. But... I find color in "ls" invaluable.

Color conveys information in a very unobtrusive way (if it isn't excessive). Much better to see blue text and knowing immediately that it's a directory, than looking at the permissions column or warts ("ls -F").

Actually, colorless "ls" makes the system feel old. It's the feeling I get every day when using AIX, for example. I just feel like changing the color scheme to green-on-black or amber-on-black just to feel like the old days.

    I've never experienced any of these problems.
    vi always works for me and has done since about 1997.

This would be because you don't expect to navigate around vi with arrow keys when you're in insert mode.

[Although I've tested this on openbsd this morning, and even that seems to be supported now - a shame, it promotes bad habits.]

I'd guess that (like me) guard of tera came to unix via a redhat derivative, and developed all sorts of bad habits there which makes the transition to other unixes more difficult.

For me, this is a major reason for the success of linux with young developers - it makes some things easy and friendly, but in doing so locks you in to expectations that stymie your development. Not unlike Microsoft Word.

    Coloured "ls" is one of those things that is
    absolutely entirely useless if you actually know
    how to use ls.

Another example of the same dynamic.

I think you nailed it there. Some background which backs up your assertions:

I use hjkl for navigation in vi as it's the lowest common denominator. It's always there. I use vim these days (with syntax highlighting!), but I barely get past the basic "classic vi" command set.

I came from a VMS, RISCiX, SunOS and Solaris background and I generally tend not to use conveniences that often. I'm mindful with respect to portability having had to move code from HPUX en-masse which wasn't fun. The plus side is scripts that I wrote in 1994 still work fine :-)

I'm not a fan of easy - only a fan of simple, elegant and right.

My keyboard has arrows and therefore I'm going to use those.

And I'm not getting off our lawn.

So does mine but they're too far from the other keys...

I don't care because I can actually move my arms. Even better, if I move them a bit during the day, the chance of getting carpal tunnel is reduced.

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