invsblduck

> I'm a curmudgeonly old man fond of old tech, but I have still had a Wayland-only setup since early 2020

You must not be that curmudgeonly! I haven't tried Wayland yet, and so long as people are still arguing about it, I'm too afraid to even try it. :-)

> Were smartphones more like PCs, you could buy an iPhone and put Android on it, then use any of the iOS, Google Play, or Amazon stores to install apps.

It's never been like that. What you wrote is fundamentally the same idea as: "If consumer computers more like consumer computers, you could buy a MacBook Pro and run RedHat Linux on it, then run any of the macOS applications or Linux applications that exist in the world."

While the mobile computing ecosystem and details are quite different, it's mostly same cocktail of things: Commercial hardware that is either open or closed, a [maybe commercial] OS, and applications that execute under version X of the OS and version Y of a runtime.

why is this so astounding to those commenting on twitter? because git doesn't artificially limit the line length?

i've used ansi sequences in my zsh prompt for 20 years to make colors and move the cursor; it's just in-band ascii that is interpreted by the terminal emulator, no?

same. i don't raise on click. this is incredibly useful when a smaller window is in the foreground--and perhaps a window underneath is maximized--and i just need to select/copy something from the background real quick. the main task i am working on is in the foreground, and i don't want its window to immediately vanish from my sight because it's mentally and visually disruptive (in fact, i usually don't want to blast every other window out of sight when the maximized window raises either). i will easily raise the background window when i need to (in a variety of ways, depending upon whether i am currently using keyboard or mouse); meanwhile, i can lazily focus it and interact with it while all my windows stay put. it's very calming.

> I bought a Mac now. I’m too old for the fight.

I said the same a decade ago. As of last week, I'm back on X11... chipping away at configs for hours and hours and hours.

But I have libnotify popups now. :D

Thank you for the epic reference! Despite all the classic works in computer history, I've come to realize that TAOUP is honestly/possibly my favorite. ok, maybe tied for favorite...

Most newer/younger people don't like or know Make; it's old, arcane software.

It differentiates between TABs and Spaces because each one signifies a different thing to follow: Lines starting with TAB indicate that a _recipe_ follows (which is shell syntax), and lines NOT starting with TAB indicate that a _rule_ follows (ie., native Makefile grammar/syntax).

Hate it or not, it's been a reliable workhorse for decades.

Thanks, i'll give it a try. :)

After reading your reply to OP below, I agree we have a super similar path. Especially the beginning:

> My first burnout was pure depletion of energy. I was young, passionate, and believed in doing the best work I could. I was addicted to work and pushed myself to deliver. I did, and built a career. I left after almost a decade at that company [...]

(However, I never found a way to leave "Tech" for another profession--especially once I achieved a certain salary range, and others depended on me.)

> I can’t shoot the shit and talk strace or gdb with any of them.

Know the feeling exactly...

i'm about 40 yrs old - been working in tech (with linux) since the late 90s. gave my life to it, lost my physical and mental health; burned out numerous times. can't stand this industry anymore.

moral of the story: 99% of people still don't understand the nature of software. very few people--like rich hickey (clojure), or fpb (mythical man-month)--seem to get it. tech is mainstream and most people are missing historical context and experience.

(the goals of capitalism are typically at odds with building systems of the highest quality--and understandably so.)

the only creative spark in computing i have to sooth myself anymore is reading lisp or unix books from the 80s and 90s, because the content is so thoughtful (given the culture and smaller community at the time). the internet has become ruined by advertising and bloatware, and the culture has largely been ruined by bad habits and misunderstanding, imo.

Not a history book, per se, but a great tour into the culture and philosophy of Unix: The Art of Unix Programming [1], by Eric Raymond. Chapter 2 is titled "History."

You also have resources like The Unix Heritage Society [2], who show a timeline of historic events on their wiki [3].

I bought Brian Kernighan's memoir [4], which so far is an incredibly detailed and personal account of his time at BTL.

[1] http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/

[2] https://www.tuhs.org/

[3] https://wiki.tuhs.org/doku.php?id=events:start

[4] https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan/d...

Then there's this debacle I've never spent enough time getting to the bottom of... https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/dhrcxw/james_g...

That TeleVideo ad is amazing. Thank you!

I wrote a lot of xml docbook in the early 2000s. I developed dozens editor macros and bindings to make it easier for myself, and I used xslt to generate other formats (mostly html). Seems like I haven't used anything but markdown, rst, and wiki for the last decade+.

You're right. I can do that. I didn't want to risk starting a flame war by admitting I have twelve main `ls' aliases (twelve unique argv incantations), and that I keep them portable across platforms. LOL. I started doing this about 20 yrs ago. Many times, I will inject them with a zsh or keyboard macro, since I type on a custom keymap on a programmable keyboard. So I didn't want yet another conditional branch in my configuration management. ;) Not sure whether "special" or just demented...

Nice tips!! bat(1) is fantastic, wow. exa(1) seems neat, but the inconsiderate--and likely deliberate--lack of compatibility with ls(1) flags means I will never use it any time soon... I have decades' worth of aliases, scripts, and reflexive muscle-memory using GNU ls, so it's not even close to being worth the pain of changing.

Great read https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=1022

pfSense [on Netgate appliance] for me.

Not nitpicking. Useless Use of Cat is an old thing: http://catb.org/jargon/html/U/UUOC.html

> Any given combination of pipe tools, there's a kind of random chance they'll actually work in the end or not.

While this may be your experience, the mechanism of FIFO pipes in Unix (which is filehandles and buffers, basically), is an old one that is both elegant and robust; it doesn't "randomly" fail due to unreliability of the core algorithm or components. In 20 years, I never had an init script or bash command fail due to the pipe(3) call itself being unreliable.

If you misunderstand detailed behavior of the commands you are stitching together--or details of how you're transiting the network in case of an ssh remote command--then yes, things may go wrong. Especially if you are creating Hail Mary one-liners, which become unwieldy.

+1. I also created an account to say, "Lots of Bash bugs."

Thank you for the cool ideas!

Lots of Bash bugs, wow.