EnsignWashout

As long as our health is perfect, of course.

Linux, MacOS and Windows have been completely rewritten multiple times across their existence.

So it's not like the original decisions are all still in play.

Windows and Mac OS were rewritten under some particular weird duresses of closed source profit driven engineering; so it has been a mix of improvements and seemingly illogical setbacks.

Linux developers still need to eat, so some of the same (corporate) influences are there.

But the average engineer who sets out to create a brand new completely modern operating system - usually decides to reuse any components of Linux that they don't have any concerns with...

Which usually gives us yet another cool new Linux variant.

But sometimes we get...

Sacrilege!

Not our fault everyone blows past the kind offer of : vimtutor on startup! (I kid. The default editor shouldn't require a class.)

You're 100% correct. Nano is a perfectly reasonable default.

That said, it is 2026. It also wouldn't kill us to default to an interactive one-time prompt that defaults to nano, but offers one or two others, and removes itself after setting the user's choice.

Like it cannot print invisible characters.

I was looking at an option to display invisible characters in Kate like last week. So it got better, I guess.

haha!

Sometimes I feel like my side of the holy war isn't engaging in completely good faith.

I might switch sides to emacs if my fingers were long enough to reach the key combinations.

Maybe I'll go try it, anyway!

...

What was the command to exit vi, again...?

But but but...vimtutor is right there on startup - so it's an easily obtained diploma...

I'll see myself out.

kate is fantastic, all around.

Ctrl+Alt+V makes the key bindings tolerable. (Vi mode)

Yes. Lack of :r! is what keeps me from using most editors that aren't vim.

There's so many things I don't remember well enough to type accurately from memory, but I know the command to fetch quickly.

• Agentic AI: A list of traditional IF THEN statements that do things based on the output of the magical LLM and then create a new prompt that they feed back into the LLM in a never ending loop, with the aim of consuming as many tokens as possible.

It's so much worse than that. We use the pleasant answer predictor to predict what function calls and arguments passed to those functions might be the most pleasing.

It can provide all of the capabilities of piping curl into sudo with none of the warm fuzzy feeling of knowing I've turned over control of my computer's fate to a stranger on the Internet.

Instead, I've turned my computer's fate over to a statistical approximation of the slurry from mixing together the outputs of every stranger from the Internet.

Exactly. And they need to make back the biggest up-front loss in the history of investment, and probably - even adjusted for inflation - in the history of currency.

And all that on a product that people don't want.

"You're absolutely right. I did hallucinate sending an ambulance, more than once, earlier. Let me correct that and dispatch an ambulance to your location."