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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anyway i’ve been thinking about how to understand the way “the terminal” works it feels really important to understand the cultural impact of specific programs or projects (like xterm, the GNU project, etc)

i think it’s something a lot of people are intuitively aware of just from using the terminal and noticing patterns

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@b0rk in '94 I used (sun's) db (dbg?, does anyone remember?) and a friend asked me why I didn't use gdb. It was such an amazingly different experience, the gdb ui seemed to be designed with care---dare I say love?---for an actual human (me!) using it.

I went to read all of gnu.org, the philosophy (empowering the user instead of keeping them ignorant), the coding standards (info instead of elitist manual pages, no arbitrary limits, etc ...) and decided I wanted to be part of this.

The reason some of us prefer to say GNU/Linux is rooted in the idea that even people that have been using "Linux" for decades, may not have heard about GNU.