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Re: [LUG] Not OT, but apropos of nothing

 

I use all of these tools without exception every day of my life, working
or not and I literally couldn't function without them. I thank god,
Richard Stallman and every FLOSS hippy that followed after every time I
use them. They also have a special added bonus in that these five tools
technically give you the ability to then go and recreate any other
program with them as well - cool!

+1

i worked on cars for a year, once, and one of the first things i
noticed was that all these really talented mechanics were completely
drowned in debt to the tool dealers.  they collected these beautiful
toolkits, understandably fetishised them, but were locked into a kind
serfdom by the process.

it disturbed me.  still does.

so yeah, the software situation, by comparison, is more than cool.  it
it is protection against serfdom.

What about anyone else?

without the gnu project---both its utilities and political
clarity---man, i just don't know.  interesting times.  i don't like to
imagine them any darker.

rogue/nethack: did gary gygax know he was writing the specification
for the best *computer* game ever?

lynx: it seems like other web browsers use me instead.  or at least
that's how it seems.  i prefer it the other way around.  i like w3m
too, and used it for a month or two instead.  tabs were cool.  but i
eventually got impatient looking for adequate documentation, and
switched back to lynx.

screen: all i ask of a window manager is that it not remind me that it
isn't screen.

apt: thank god.

regular expressions: thank stephen kleene.  (you know what i mean.)

ssh: when telnet was phased out, i worried that the replacement would
make my life hard.  but it didn't.

latex: because hey, free typesetting machine!

emacs: because hey, free giant squid!

vlc: because every giant squid deserves an entertaining and
accomplished companion.

less: newly appreciated after stumbling on the '&' search command.

man: because, unlike most functions purporting to fetch documentation,
it is rarely broken and its output is almost always worth reading.  if
only it came with a toilet seat to sit on, it would be perfect.

** vi - no arguments about damn emacs please. good luck using emacs
to fix config files in a statically linked recovery shell

hm, i see.  hasn't come to that yet.  i guess i'd try sed?

the one thing i like about being forced to use vi ocassionally is that
false sense of emacs proficiency it gives me.

-wes

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