This reminded me of a Rob Pike comment. I can't find the text, but it was along the lines of, "I recently tried Linux. It was as if every bug I fixed in the 1980s had reverted."
Xterm(1) now UTF-8 by default on OpenBSD
21–30 of 144 posts
Re: Xterm(1) now UTF-8 by default on OpenBSD
#22I've been trying to teach myself some unicode code points because I'm getting sick and tired of continually Googling them and copying and pasting the result or bringing up a symbol character table. In fact, I'd say keyboards are woefully out to date. Specifically, I keep looking up † dagger (U+2020) and ‡ double-dagger (U+2021) for footnotes, black heart (U+2065) to be romantic, black star (U+2605) to talk about Davi…
A few months ago, I had the idea to remake the old Space Cadet keyboard. One change was to make the bucky bits (e.g. control, alt, meta, super, etc.) allow you to type unicode characters instead of APL characters. Other than that and having lower case parentheses (not needing to use shift to type ( or ) ), the keyboard would be like any other mechanical keyboard.
Did you follow through on it? I have wanted a modern space cadet keyboard for a long time, but the current trend in keyboards seems to be to have less keys, not more (a trend that just doesn't make much sense to me).
Re: Xterm(1) now UTF-8 by default on OpenBSD
#23I've been trying to teach myself some unicode code points because I'm getting sick and tired of continually Googling them and copying and pasting the result or bringing up a symbol character table. In fact, I'd say keyboards are woefully out to date. Specifically, I keep looking up † dagger (U+2020) and ‡ double-dagger (U+2021) for footnotes, black heart (U+2065) to be romantic, black star (U+2605) to talk about Davi…
You can make your own keyboard layouts with X11.
This is mine:
https://github.com/jleclanche/dotfiles/blob/master/X11/xkb/s...
Re: Xterm(1) now UTF-8 by default on OpenBSD
#24Every time some link or headline reads "now UTF-8 by default", the only reasonable response in 2016 is "about time".
Re: Xterm(1) now UTF-8 by default on OpenBSD
#25This reminded me of a Rob Pike comment. I can't find the text, but it was along the lines of, "I recently tried Linux. It was as if every bug I fixed in the 1980s had reverted."
That was baseless posturing. A famous study and its follow-up found that the utilities on GNU/Linux are more robust, and that was twenty years ago:
ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/paradyn/technical_papers/fuzz-revisited.pdf [1995]
"This study parallels our 1990 study (that tested only the basic UNIX utilities); all systems that we compared between 1990 and 1995 noticeably improved in reliability, but still had significant rates of failure. The reliability of the basic utilities from GNU and Linux were noticeably better than those of the commercial systems."
I doubt there has been much improvement in those commercial Unixes; they are basically dead. (What would be the business case for fixing something in userland utility on commerical Unix?)
The maintainers of the free BSD's have been carrying that torch, but they don't believe in features.
Stepping into a BSD variant is like a trip back to the 1980's. Not exactly the real 1980's, but a parallel 1980's in which Unix is more robust---but the features are all rolled back, so it's just about as unpleasant to use.
Re: Xterm(1) now UTF-8 by default on OpenBSD
#26This reminded me of a Rob Pike comment. I can't find the text, but it was along the lines of, "I recently tried Linux. It was as if every bug I fixed in the 1980s had reverted."
That was baseless posturing. A famous study and its follow-up found that the utilities on GNU/Linux are more robust, and that was twenty years ago: ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/paradyn/technical_papers/fuzz-revisited.pdf [1995] " This study parallels our 1990 study (that tested only the basic UNIX utilities); all systems that we compared between 1990 and 1995 noticeably improved in reliability, but still had significant rat…
Then the commercial systems must have been horrible. Take a look at GNU code, then at plan 9 code. Combine a few GNU core utils, and you have more code than the whole plan 9 kernel. Granted Plan 9 came out a little passed 1990.
Re: Xterm(1) now UTF-8 by default on OpenBSD
#27I've been trying to teach myself some unicode code points because I'm getting sick and tired of continually Googling them and copying and pasting the result or bringing up a symbol character table. In fact, I'd say keyboards are woefully out to date. Specifically, I keep looking up † dagger (U+2020) and ‡ double-dagger (U+2021) for footnotes, black heart (U+2065) to be romantic, black star (U+2605) to talk about Davi…
A few months ago, I had the idea to remake the old Space Cadet keyboard. One change was to make the bucky bits (e.g. control, alt, meta, super, etc.) allow you to type unicode characters instead of APL characters. Other than that and having lower case parentheses (not needing to use shift to type ( or ) ), the keyboard would be like any other mechanical keyboard.
As someone who programs in modern APL (no joke check out dyalog) I think this is terrible. Besides the APL characters are just the greek characters, and all sorts of things use those.
Re: Xterm(1) now UTF-8 by default on OpenBSD
#28This reminded me of a Rob Pike comment. I can't find the text, but it was along the lines of, "I recently tried Linux. It was as if every bug I fixed in the 1980s had reverted."
That was baseless posturing. A famous study and its follow-up found that the utilities on GNU/Linux are more robust, and that was twenty years ago: ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/paradyn/technical_papers/fuzz-revisited.pdf [1995] " This study parallels our 1990 study (that tested only the basic UNIX utilities); all systems that we compared between 1990 and 1995 noticeably improved in reliability, but still had significant rat…
I don't think Rob meant stability. Rob was probably referring to the reality that modern Linux hasn't innovated itself past SVR4 by any appreciable amount.
We are still using X, still using terminals powered by control codes, etc.
Rob probably sees things like LANG and LC_ALL as bugs. His fix was UTF-8 everywhere, always. Where is Linux? Still in bag-of-bytes-o-rama.
Re: Xterm(1) now UTF-8 by default on OpenBSD
#29I and others have pushed changes into XTerm to improve mouse support of terminal-based applications. All terminal emulators should implement XTerm's command set, especially these: Bracketed paste mode: allows editor to determine that text is from a mouse paste instead of typed in. This way, the editor can disable auto-indent and other things which can mess up the paste. Libvte now supports this! Base64 selection tran…
Bracketed paste mode is also useful for IRC, to prevent misfiring a huge paste into a channel.
Re: Xterm(1) now UTF-8 by default on OpenBSD
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was baseless posturing. A famous study and its follow-up found that the utilities on GNU/Linux are more robust, and that was twenty years ago: ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/paradyn/technical_papers/fuzz-revisited.pdf [1995] " This study parallels our 1990 study (that tested only the basic UNIX utilities); all systems that we compared between 1990 and 1995 noticeably improved in reliability, but still had significant rat…
Then the commercial systems must have been horrible. Take a look at GNU code, then at plan 9 code. Combine a few GNU core utils, and you have more code than the whole plan 9 kernel. Granted Plan 9 came out a little passed 1990.
Only by not using subordinate clauses did you just avoid saying "plan 9" and "commercial" in the same sentence! Where is Plan 9 deployed? Who are the customers?
Plan 9 is a strawman representative of "commercial Unix".
> Combine a few GNU core utils, and you have more code than the whole plan 9 kernel.
When you actually sit down and think of the cases that can occur, that translates into code. Handle this, handle that, and the KLOC's just pile up.
Speaking of kernel size, what makes a kernel code base big? Why, device drivers for lots of hardware.