Alastair M. D. Touw 🌹 @amdt@mastodon.social

I hate computers (and programming is terrible). 💩

Editing WordPress PHP with a proportionally-spaced face? No thank you!

I hate computers (and programming is terrible). 💩

I actually wanted a Japanese maker, either Pilot or Sailor. I went with a Pilot Custom 74 with a medium nib, as I’ve done before. It’s a good, reasonably priced, everyday pen. #fountainpen #fountainpens

Buying a fountain pen:
‘We have many overseas makers… oh, excuse me, we have German and English makers among others…’

I was running on four hours sleep when I wrote this. 😴

I’m not sure what I was imagining at the time but the Linux virtual console, framebuffer, tmux and a collection of command-line interface tools isn’t it. Emacs is sort-of it, if Emacs was less of an editor and more of a Lisp machine.

I don’t want to suggest that graphical user interfaces themselves are particularly wrong or something, but I’m wondering whether my computing environment wouldn’t be simpler to use and require less resources if it was a high-resolution fixed-width character display.

I really like the upright italic face available on #Smalltalk-76 and the #Xerox #Alto seen here mostly in the class browser. It looks like it’s called Cream, but I can’t find much about it on the Web.

Screenshot by user ‘SUMIM.ST’ on Wikimedia Commons used without endorsement via CC-BY-SA-4.0 (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Smalltalk-76.png).

#retrocomputing

The X1 Carbon’s page up and page down keys being in the corners of the cursor key cluster is still fucking me up… I miss the X220’s 7-row keyboard.

I’m really looking forward to the day ‘libvte’ (#GNOME Terminal, Tilix etc.) supports ligatures. #linux 🔗 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=584160

‘Unix is not my ideal system, but it is not too bad. The essential features of Unix seem to be good ones, and I think I can fill in what Unix lacks without spoiling them. And a system compatible with Unix would be convenient for many other people to adopt.’—Richard M. Stallman, The GNU Manifesto (https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.en.html).

I will never — I asbolutely refuse to — understand why Japanese people wash concrete or tarmac, by hand, with a dirty cloth.

I just read the Wikipedia article on CLISP (🔗 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLISP) and it says, ‘[Its author] Haible did not originally intend to distribute CLISP under the GPL, but in a well-publicised email exchange with Richard Stallman, he eventually agreed to do so. The issue at stake was whether CLISP was a derivative work of the GNU readline library.’

This sound like it could be what Stallman was referring to, is it? 🤔

In his overview of the GNU project (🔗 https://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html), Richard Stallman mentions one benefit of releasing Readline under the GPL (rather than the LGPL) is that, ‘… at least one useful application has been made free software specifically so it could use Readline, and that is a real gain for the community.’

I’ve been wondering what that application is.