[Toybox] [PATCH] optional fatter cat(1)

[Rich Felker]

On Thu, Jan 01, 2015 at 10:41:22PM -0600, Rob Landley wrote:
> On 01/01/2015 01:04 PM, dmccunney wrote:
> > On Thu, Jan 1, 2015 at 1:39 AM, David Seikel <onefang at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> >> I have a simple test to decide if I like an editor as a result of these
> >> decades of random editor usage.  If I can't sit down with the editor
> >> and figure out how to do basic editing and saving in less than a
> >> minute (sans documentation), then in my opinion it's a crap editor.
> >> Both TECO and vi fail this test miserably, though oddly enough I have a
> >> soft spot for TECO.
> > 
> > These days, the general assumption is that you can open a file in an
> > editor with "<editor> <filename>", and that once up, cursor keys can
> > be used to move around in the file and that text can be added where
> > desired by typing it at the cursor location and deleted with Backspace
> > or Delete keys.
> > 
> > Vi originated in the days when some of those assumptions might not be
> > true.  Some early terminals on Unix systems didn't *have* cursor keys
> > or F-keys.  The vi command set and separation between input and
> > command modes was a result.
> 
> Indeed.
> 
> However, ubuntu's decision to only allow you to cursor around in insert
> mode when you call "vim" and to _disable_ that when you call it as "vi"
> (so the cursor keys instead crap B[ and such all over your text) is
> insane and stupid. And the fix is to delete /etc/vim/vimrc.tiny and make
> it a symlink to just "vimrc" in the same directory. And the fact you
> _need_ to do that on each new ubuntu install is just one more way that
> Mark Shuttleworth is trying to cram his personal preferences down
> people's throats.

Yes this is idiotic.

> (Redirecting /bin/sh to point to dash instead of bash was still a dumber
> move, though.)

I fail to see how this was dumb. It made shellshock a non-issue and
massively reduced the memory requirements (and probably increased the
speed) of portable shell scripts. Bash-specific scripts should always
be using #!/bin/bash.

> If vi/uemacs/joe/nano are trivial extensions of the same basic
> infrastructure (sort of true modulo vi command mode), I have no problem
> implementing lots of sets of keybindings. But the first target is vi
> because it's the only one actually in posix.

My guess is that this is not so easy, and that attempting to do it
this way would have a lot of subtle failures that would just annoy
users. But it might be a lot less annoying than being stuck with
nothing but vi...

Rich

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