141–150 of 224 posts
On the one hand, as a technologist, this pisses me off because we've advanced so far in the field of word processing. Autocorrect, holding more than 40 pages in memory, cut/paste, etc. Why does this Luddite persist in the old ways?!?!?! But as a writer who knows the pains of distraction... maybe he's on to something?
That's probably the first thing a lifelong professional screenwriter would turn off.
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Just for fun, I have installed "Joe's Own Editor" by running "yum install joe" from Oracle's EPEL mirror. Then I ran "joe /etc/passwd" (after exiting root) then pressed ^K-h, and Wordstar's help menu appeared. Wordstar and the vi editor share evolution on serial terminals of the 70s (vi specifically on the Lear-Siegler ADM-3A). They were designed for a minimal number of keys, and thus keeping the hands on the home ro…
I use JOE as my daily driver. I grew up on Borland Turbo C, so it was an easy transition for me when I picked up Linux circa 2000. JOE ships with several keybinding variants as well. E.g. `jstar` launches JOE with more WordStar-like bindings.
George R.R. Martin also wrote his books on a DOS machine running WordStar 4.0
Also using an IBM Model M keyboard, it would seem.
I often wonder this about old tech. What attracts some people to keep using it? Is it the comfort or familiarity or is it minimalism? I sometimes want to feel the experience of my Pentium 1 PC with that rubberdome keyboard and ball mouse. But I know it was a frustrating experience. The mouse didn't work exactly, we had to alt+ctrl+delete every 20-30 minutes. They keyboard felt like jello. The CRT monitor gave us head…
Just for fun, I have installed "Joe's Own Editor" by running "yum install joe" from Oracle's EPEL mirror. Then I ran "joe /etc/passwd" (after exiting root) then pressed ^K-h, and Wordstar's help menu appeared. Wordstar and the vi editor share evolution on serial terminals of the 70s (vi specifically on the Lear-Siegler ADM-3A). They were designed for a minimal number of keys, and thus keeping the hands on the home ro…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why I like my Kindle so much (and other e-readers are the same presumably). It does one thing very well, and not much else. I could read the same book on my phone but it's always popping up alerts and buzzing and so forth, breaking my attention.
Linux console gives me the same feeling. It's partly the font, partly the focus (no interruptions), partly the lack of latency. OSX + iTerm2 is so damn laggy vs. Linux even on worse hardware. It just sux when you have to, you know, input Chinese or open a PDF. Gotta say though, Dune was a disappointment to me, having grown up with Dune 2 on MSDOS. The old Dune had, you know, deeper characters. There's nothing like ea…
Don't know about PDFs, but for Chinese IBus works just fine with XTerm.
On the one hand, as a technologist, this pisses me off because we've advanced so far in the field of word processing. Autocorrect, holding more than 40 pages in memory, cut/paste, etc. Why does this Luddite persist in the old ways?!?!?! But as a writer who knows the pains of distraction... maybe he's on to something?
I don't view autocorrect as an advancement to be honest. It causes more issues than it solves IMO. On a phone it's ok to have it because typos are so frequent but on a PC I'd never use it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why I like my Kindle so much (and other e-readers are the same presumably). It does one thing very well, and not much else. I could read the same book on my phone but it's always popping up alerts and buzzing and so forth, breaking my attention.
Linux console gives me the same feeling. It's partly the font, partly the focus (no interruptions), partly the lack of latency. OSX + iTerm2 is so damn laggy vs. Linux even on worse hardware. It just sux when you have to, you know, input Chinese or open a PDF. Gotta say though, Dune was a disappointment to me, having grown up with Dune 2 on MSDOS. The old Dune had, you know, deeper characters. There's nothing like ea…
This is one of those things you notice in a jarring way as a Linux user coming to other platforms, but people kinda look at you sideways and don't believe you when you tell them.
What I tend to notice, especially as someone who prefers to use a full screen terminal tiled with tmux, is (1) poor availability of Quake-style dropdown terminals on macOS and Windows and (2) extremely slow rendering on most terminal emulators for those platforms. On the other hand, I think I've heard some Mac users say they detect some input lag on Linux terminals.