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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I don’t really recommend people learn vi/vim even though I’ve been using it for years and love it. It’s a very personal thing and the time you invest into learning it might not be worth it if you don’t use its features enough.

    I think it’s dependent on your personality and neurodivergence/neurotypical characteristics (I don’t know a word that encompasses all of this). If you’re the type of person who gets really annoyed/distracted by any sort of “friction” in the editing process then I think you may be a good candidate to learn vi. Otherwise probably not!

    Edit: by the way I’m also a LaTeX user!


  • Yeah. A lot of people who use vim don’t know how to use the full power of vi. They’ll often install plugins to do things they could have easily done with built in features!

    The one area where regular vi sucks though is undo. If you want multiple undo then you’ll have to at least go with something like nvi.


  • The issue is with creating more work for others. Supporting a multi-language toolchain and build environment is a lot more work than a single language one. The R4L folks have made it their mission to shoehorn Rust into the kernel and they’ve explicitly stated that they will not avoid making more work for others. This has upset some longterm maintainers who did not sign up for additional workload.

    Linus Torvalds has been accused of many things but he has always been loyal to his best maintainers. That’s been a big key to his success.









  • There’s a lot of advantages that simply come with using a more popular distribution. For one, having a larger pool of package maintainers (and therefore more packages) is pretty important. Have you ever tried using NixOS as a daily driver? I did a few years ago. Very annoying having to create my own packages for so many different (and relatively common) things I wanted to use.






  • All the spatial persistence stuff was handled by the desktop database which was an invisible file that got stored on the disk. Hard drives and floppies each had their own so that if you shared a floppy with a friend the spatial properties of the floppy would travel with it. This also worked if you moved a hard drive from one system to another for the same reason.

    It also worked over AppleShare network file sharing. Where it didn’t work was if you had 2 different computers since there was no way to sync information between them. You essentially treated each computer as its own thing which is really more in keeping with the spirit of spatial design. After all, it would be really weird if 2 different drawers in different rooms in your house somehow always had identical contents which stayed in sync.


  • Q for all those with suggestions: do any of these attempt to replicate the Spatial Finder? No other system I’ve seen (contemporary to OS 9 or since then) seems to have got this element correct (or even attempted to do so).

    It’s such a key part of the OS 9 (and earlier) experience. Double click a folder and it opens where you expect it to, in the shape you left it, with the icons laid out as you left them. It’s a method of working that gives you great familiarity and confidence.

    If anyone’s worked in a kitchen or workshop for a long time and developed a deep memory for the layout and the location of every tool, material, and control, then they’ll know what I’m talking about. You can move around and work incredibly efficiently, relying greatly on muscle memory.

    Since the demise of OS 9, the only way to retain this level of operation has been to rely heavily on the keyboard. Since almost everything on the screen is transient and unreliably positioned (non-spatial), only the keyboard is persistent enough to allow us to work at the speed of thought and rely on muscle memory. It’s been so long now that I think people forget (or never knew) that the contents of the screen could also be persistent and spatial this way.