for example I thought the “vim vs emacs” flamewars were silly (who cares? use what you want!)

but actually I feel like some of the GNU software design decisions are really influenced by emacs (readline, info pages) and that does actually have an effect

(please don’t tell me that readline has a vi mode)

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also this guidance on command line arguments is great, I didn’t realize these things came from the GNU project and I really appreciate them https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Command_002dLine-Interfaces.html#Command_002dLine-Interfaces

(via @zwol)

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also I didn’t realize that standardizing “—help” came from the GNU project, it makes me wonder if folks have proposed adding —help to programs that predated GNU (or are from a BSD project etc) and if so what that conversation looked like

I imagine it’s not always possible to do without breaking backwards compatibility

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@b0rk somewhat aside, a lot of old unix tools would balk at "cmd file -opt" but gnu tools had no issue handling options coming after arguments

i had a friend who used to complain of "gnu bloatware" until he was forced to use (fairly old) solaris at work and he installed the gnu userland tools within minutes of trying to get the older tools to behave in ways he was used to