I ran across this 2020 article that is part rant on the state of Unix documentation, part proposal of a way forward based on troff and a new documentation viewer. It has a good summary of the history of Unix documentation systems.
Have you missed it? I almost had, I saw it yesterday but it's too important to miss because he takes the time to filter through all the amount of news which mostly isn't and then takes the time to reread the articles which are news and then he puts them for us in a nice blog post
Let's just give him some Love
@vermaden
One of my first encounters with the Beautiful BSD Operating Systems was on a machine that Loves Pepper.
It was configured to do one task and do that one task well. The machine was a file server configured to serve diverse clients with speed agility and redundancy. The machine which loved to be called ChiliBox had space for just a couple of hard drives HDDs. That meant that if you want it true redundancy, you had to connect external hard drives
Those enclosures could also be provided by the hardware vendor
The ChiliBox was a fun toy to play with
It served my clients well for a number of years where all that was needed was to swap out hard drives which were worn without losing any data the only patients the client needed to have is to make the resilvering of the new HDD complete itself.
A true computing legend and co-creator of UNIX, B, and Go—technologies that shaped the modern software world and still power the bulk of today’s infrastructure. 💻️🔥
This is now my fourth, instance on the fedi - so new instance, new #intro I suppose.
I'm Steff, a transfem living/working in Chicago USA with my queer family. I'm a former biker, Queer Nation member, and HIV and queer activist. After a lot of denial, and thanks, to some folks here on the fedi, I finally confronted my gender dysphoria and issues, and begun transitioning last year.
I have worked as a cab driver, line cook, #theater technical director, master electrician, #unix systems admin, network architect, and engineering director.
We have cats, which I really need to post more picts of. I have sat of the BoD of various gay and queer organizations, including theaters, Leather and #BDSM clubs.
Fundamentally, I think people are better than they think they are, but I have no patience for bigots, racists, sexists, or transphobes. Cosplaying a fascist or bigot means you are a fascist or bigot.
Always Looking to connect with other trans women and fems to try to navigate this mess we all call a life.
Just finished porting another of my shell scripts to Ruby. Moving from Linux to BSD has had some surprises and this is one of them:
People make a big deal about writing portable POSIX shell scripts, but it's pretty rare to find a platform that doesn't have, e.g. Bash. No, the problem has been all of the other standard utilities - it turns out I was depending on non-POSIX features in the core utils all over the place without realizing it!
I’m currently working on a new project: cupertino.social - a future home for the Apple community here on the decentralized web.
I’m building this because I believe we need a space that combines the elegance of the Apple ecosystem with the ethical soul of the Fediverse. A place for those who love the "Unix heart" of their devices and value privacy as a fundamental right.
We are currently "under construction," fine-tuning the infrastructure (strictly European-hosted and independent!) to ensure a smooth, clean, and respectful experience.
Stay tuned for the official launch post soon. I can’t wait to share this journey with you all.
#AskFedi : How to bulk download all emails in inbox from #Yahoo email? I confess, I do not have a good habit of archiving and backing-up my emails. Now my inbox is booming and reaching ~10k emails since I have subscribed to a few mail lists. I do have #Alpine set up locally on my laptop to read them once in a while. I tried Select All and Save in Alpine however it is too slow and easily fail simply because it took so long that remote server would kill the connection. #FOSS#Unix#Linux
Screen editors (nvi, vim, etc.) assume you want to scroll,
see context, and move a cursor interactively.
Huge files break those assumptions.
For large files (1GB+):
Inspect: head, tail, grep
Understand structure: awk, sed -n (stream, don’t load)
Surgical changes: ed or sed
Open a screen editor only when you need to rewrite text.
Benchmark (1GB text file):
nvi -> 20.1s (eager line indexing ~25M lines)
vim -> 7.7s (lazy loading, deferred UI cost)
ed -> 4.0s (I/O-bound buffering, no TUI overhead)
Large files don’t need better editors.
They need better workflows.
For huge files, the right solution is not tuning screen editors,
but using the right tools:
shell tools for inspection
ed for known, surgical changes
screen editors when interactive rewriting is actually needed
PS:
nvi chooses predictability over perceived speed.
The slowdown is not a flaw — it’s the cost of preserving
classic vi semantics within a screen-editor model.
Screen editors (nvi, vim, etc.) assume you want to scroll,
see context, and move a cursor interactively.
Huge files break those assumptions.
For large files (1GB+):
Inspect: head, tail, grep
Understand structure: awk, sed -n (stream, don’t load)
Surgical changes: ed or sed
Open a screen editor only when you need to rewrite text.
Benchmark (1GB text file):
nvi -> 20.1s (eager line indexing ~25M lines)
vim -> 7.7s (lazy loading, deferred UI cost)
ed -> 4.0s (I/O-bound buffering, no TUI overhead)
Large files don’t need better editors.
They need better workflows.
For huge files, the right solution is not tuning nvi,
but using the right tools:
shell for inspection, ed for known changes,
and nvi when interactive rewriting is actually needed.
PS:
nvi chooses predictability over perceived speed.
The slowdown is not a flaw — it’s the cost of correctness
within a screen-editor model.
I spent the last days building and testing a few minimalist X11 window managers on Slackware: evilwm, shod and Notion — even patching Notion to build with GCC 15.
evilwm is still my lightweight, workspace-oriented backup WM, but for a tab-based, rule-driven stacking workflow, nothing I tried comes close to pekwm.
Firefox, terminal and mail living in one frame, out of the way — that’s still the sweet spot for me.
52-year-old 9-track tape found with Unix V4, the operating system that everything else came from. Only 20 copies ever existed. University of Utah found theirs in a storage closet, knew what they'd found, and got the help of the California Computer Museum to reconstruct the delicate data.
I really enjoyed reading this article, which treats its readers as capable of understanding, and explains some of the technical background and challenges. Kudos to the author Courtney Tanner for conveying the excitement of this find to the audience.
Running out of disk space on your Linux, macOS, BSD, or Unix-like OS? Or perhaps you're hitting the classic disk quota limits set by your sysadmin? Fear not. Run du -sh * | sort -h command to get a sorted list of your directory sizes so you can remove or compress unwanted files. Here is another useful shell alias:
release fountain : Beyond the Iron Cycle
#linux #gaming #indiegaming #cyberpunk #decentralization #free-and-libre #terminal #unix #network ...