[Beowulf] 9 traits of the veteran Unix admin

[Robert G. Brown]

On Thu, 17 Feb 2011, Lawrence Stewart wrote:

> I have a nice "me" or microemacs, written by Dave Conroy, back in the day.  The tarball is 121K.
> I asked him how to change the keybindings and he said "use the change configuration command".
> "It's called "cc" on the system."

Jove is one notch up from that.  It does parse a .joverc and come with
an integrated tutorial and actual documentation.  But otherwise they are
probably very similar.

It does have its own wikipedia page:

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JOVE

and I originally used it on PDPs in 1986, on Suns by 1987, back when it
was still quite young.  That's why I can't, actually, give it up even
though it is a mild PITA to keep it compiling as libc and termcap and
some of the other things the original BSD Unix sources relied on have
gradually morphed.  The current 2011 version is up to 4.16.0.73, and is
distributed in Debian and trivially buildable into an RPM from a
specfile in the tarball.  I wish it were in Fedora; I have to build my
own as one of the first things I do after each upgrade or install,
pecking away in vi as required until then, cursing...;-)

I see microemacs also has its own wikipedia page.  And ooo, Linus
Torvalds uses a linear descendent of microemacs!  I think that does it!
Small/compiled emacs variants are an acceptable alternative to vi on the
Real Systems Administrator checksheet.

Real Emacs is OK (I suppose, scoff scoff) for developers who work on fat
systems and like to have their hands held with color coding superimposed
on e.g. html or latex or c code -- I personally find it rather
distracting and have never been able to see light green on white worth a
damn, but the real reason I don't use emacs is that its keybindings
aren't the same as jove's...

    rgb

>
> -L
>
>

Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb at phy.duke.edu