Live data from Hacker News

Xterm(1) now UTF-8 by default on OpenBSD

undeadly.org

61–70 of 144 posts

Re: Xterm(1) now UTF-8 by default on OpenBSD

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That and getting rid of the TTY altogether. We aren't using punched cards EDIT: people hate when I say this, which amuses me. The TTY must die !!!!

Seems like your mouse never broke (or, if you have a wireless one, the battery in it has never died, and if it did, you could immediately replace it).

Or are you the type that does everything on a touchscreen? Because, judging from your logic, traditional computer controls must die too...

Re: Xterm(1) now UTF-8 by default on OpenBSD

#63
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a stupid little 'clip' program I wrote that has a dictionary of common texts that I can call by name and have added to the clipboard. $ clip lod $ pbpaste ಠ_ಠ Maybe you can do the same without needing to remember code points. Something like TextExpander would accomplish the same thing.

I don't think that's stupid. I think that's a great idea. I might have to use 'xclip' to go about making something equivalent.

Can't remember where I got it from, but: https://github.com/aktau/dotfiles/blob/master/.zshrc-extra#L...

Re: Xterm(1) now UTF-8 by default on OpenBSD

#64
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That Ctrl+Shift+u hint is nice. Now I can type all the time I want without having to browse for the emoji page to copy it. And it sucks that I have to use so much that I know the code point for it (1F4A9) off the top of my head. :-( Edit: I'm definitely putting in U+1F4A9 (the PILE OF POO character), but apparently hacker news strips it out. I'm guessing it's filtering everything that has a symbol character class?

Yes! The Ctrl+Shift+u hint is nice. I can't believe I only just learnt it. How many _years_ have I been Googling unicode characters for? I am ashamed to think. I am glad PILE OF POO does not work for you. does (U+2603) snowman work? edit: noooo, no snowman

[deleted]

Re: Xterm(1) now UTF-8 by default on OpenBSD

#65
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That Ctrl+Shift+u hint is nice. Now I can type all the time I want without having to browse for the emoji page to copy it. And it sucks that I have to use so much that I know the code point for it (1F4A9) off the top of my head. :-( Edit: I'm definitely putting in U+1F4A9 (the PILE OF POO character), but apparently hacker news strips it out. I'm guessing it's filtering everything that has a symbol character class?

Yes! The Ctrl+Shift+u hint is nice. I can't believe I only just learnt it. How many _years_ have I been Googling unicode characters for? I am ashamed to think. I am glad PILE OF POO does not work for you. does (U+2603) snowman work? edit: noooo, no snowman

And still U+5350 works. Better than a thousand words sometimes.

Re: Xterm(1) now UTF-8 by default on OpenBSD

#66

UTF-8 must be the default and only encoding. Why does anything else still exist?

Yes but UTF-8 with or without byte order mark ? ;-)

Without. BOM (when used for UTF-8) is an obsolete crap invented by necrosoft in order to make their software incompatible with normal.

Re: Xterm(1) now UTF-8 by default on OpenBSD

#67
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it is only a few : Sydney Olympics lighting system was Plan9 based. Inferno was used by NASA JPL projects Lucent use a real time version of plan9 in phone masts Coraid use Plan9 on their NAS servers Researchers at LANL and IBM use plan9 on the Blue Gene, and other, supercomputers I have worked for two plan9 based companies - ok they didn't survive but we tried :) The international plan9 conferences drew about 3…

Lonely comment is lonely. Literally halfs of dozens of research projects and ones of promotional installations served! Nearly threes of dozens attended conferences, at which twos of booths were no doubt tabled, perhaps both by you, one of the only persons who apparently used Plan 9 commercially. I'm feeling nostalgic enough to go launch an inferno instance now just on principle.

Plan9 was only ever an experiment, labelled as a Research OS.

I would still say is was a successful experiment.

Re: Xterm(1) now UTF-8 by default on OpenBSD

#68
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

checkout the different implementations of echo across various operating systems: " https://gist.github.com/dchest/1091803" .

I've used the -e option in GNU's echo many times. The various other versions are strictly less useful to me. Does the option really belong in echo? Who knows, but it's certainly been useful to me. UNIX fifth edition goes for absolute minimalism. Echo in Plan 9 is apparently used enough that it's worthwhile to optimize the number of times write is called. FreeBSD echo looks like someone just learned about writev. Open…

I've used -e on GNU's `echo` quite a bit as well. But FreeBSD also supports `printf` (as does Linux by the way), so it's not a great inconvenience the missing -e flag on FreeBSD's `echo`.

    $ printf "This\tis an\nexample\n"
    This    is an
    example
You can also use the usual C-style printf parameters as well:

    $ printf "This is %-20s example\n" another
    This is another              example

Re: Xterm(1) now UTF-8 by default on OpenBSD

#69
post #21

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."

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…

> The maintainers of the free BSD's have been carrying that torch, but they don't believe in features.

I used Linux for more than a decade before switching to OpenBSD precisely because Linux developers believe in features to the point where how well they're implemented is no longer relevant.

The arrogant, know-it-all kids that we so lovingly nurtured in the Linux community grew up to be its forefront developers today. It shows.

Edit: I was hesitant to write this because it always leads to very unproductive results, but what the hell, I'll bite.

Systemd was the last straw for me, not because something something Unix philosophy (after all, OpenVMS disdained the Unix philosophy, and it worked better than Linux ever has) but because it's so bug-ridden that its interface's simplicity and elegance are next to useless.

Maintaining a non-trivial network & filesystem setup (e.g. I have a few dozen Qemu VMs, because writing software for embedded systems is like that) became a nightmare. It broke with every other update. Great if you're doing devops and this is expected and part of your job, terrible if you're doing actual development and you want an infrastructure that doesn't break between compiles.

I ragequit one afternoon, put FreeBSD on my workstation and OpenBSD on my laptop. I have not touched anything in my configuration in almost a year now and it works flawlessly. I don't think I've had it work for a whole month without having to fiddle with whatever the fuck broke in systemd, somethingsomethingkit or God knows what other thing bolted on top of the system via DBus. I can write code in peace now and that's all I want.

These are all great technologies. Systemd in particular was something I enthusiastically used at first, precisely because after Solaris' SMF -- XML-based as it is -- even OpenRC seemed like a step back to me. But, ya know, I'd actually want it to work.

Post reply on HN