i'm encouraged by the #NetBSD movement. I think Linux overestimates the number of users that were reluctant. People like me. People who were exposed to commercial Unix (SunOS, Irix, OSF/1) where on the whole, things worked, were documented, people were serious about standards, and maybe even internal kernel interfaces were documented and stable. People who were exposed to BSD and preferred its stability (and the fact that bash wasn't the default shell). But over time Linux had support for all the newest hardware, because that's where the crowds were. So we adopted Linux. Reluctantly.

But as soon as there's a reason to jump, or go back. We do. I don't suppose the reluctant adopters of Linux are a huge part of the Linux users, but there's enough. It's coming home.

Finally got round to reading the beautiful "Between the World and Me" by Ta-Nehisi Coates and i highly recommend it. I'm returning it to the library, and making a note of my favourite quote from it:

"The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free."

#bookstodon

An idiosyncrasy of Fonts & Encodings, by Yannis Haralambous is using "wyde" to mean a 2 byte quantity (16-bit), and, less often, "tetrabyte" to mean a 4-byte quantity. It's fine, and it's good to use a fairly unambiguous term, but. But, it's not glossed or footnoted _anywhere_. They just use in the middle of running text with no notes at all. A quick search suggests that "wyde" is only used by this book, and a couple of pages discussing or extracting this book.

Is there a name for a word that appears in only one text?

Motif radio buttons (only one active in group) have diamond outlines (and i do wonder if this was a ploy to avoid being sued by Apple with its round radio buttons; suing over Look-and-Free was very trendy at the time). Diamonds are... okay. But if i want a dense group of radio buttons, such as a tool palette, how should i arrange them? I can put them on a rectangular grid, but there will be a lot of wasted space in the diamond gaps: adjacent buttons will only touch at their points. Perhaps i should arrange them on a diagonal grid...

Detail from xmbdfed's current tool palette on left, a mockup for a dense arrangment on right.

I made this mock-up to show how silly it looks, but now i've made it, it doesn't look nearly as silly as i thought it would.

#Motif

Surprising how quick you get used to having some wacky font as your UI font. Rock18 from SGI in this case.

xmbdfed has a Rotate tool (and translate, shear, bold). It is now on my radar because it's the part of the program that has a hard coded sin() and cos() tables. Using the tool raises quite a few questions. Here's a rotate by 40° (yes, i deliberately picked that value to be a bit awkward). Old glyph on left, rotated glyph on right. About what point has this glyph been rotated? Why has one of the pixels been "left behind"?

I'm very skeptical that a bitmap font editor needs a rotate, other than by quarter circles, but while it is there, i think i may as well make it fit.

#xmbdfed

Ditto Ed/ed Vi/vi Sed/sed Nano/nano omg/Omg.

i am not someone to set up lots of aliases (or shell functions), but

grep should be the case insensitive grep, and
Grep should be the case sensitive version.

By default of course, the regular options should change the case sensitivity.

#grep

brb adding "valued goose" as a starting pet in nethack.

(I'm not, but maybe you should)

#nethack

New release of xmbdfed—the best bitmap editor for X11 using the beautiful Motif interface.

Release 4.7.4: https://codeberg.org/drj/xmbdfed (there is a tag, but i haven't directly linked to it)

It is not substantially changed since Mark Leisher's 4.7 release in 2004, but now compiles on at least some modern systems.

The biggest change is replacing the hand-crafted Makefile with Imakefile so it can be built with xmkmf (which is more standard for X11 apps).

I see a few distros have packaged earlier versions of xmbdfed, but i don't know anything about that. I would in principle be happy for them to package this.

Next is more substantial changes (removing some of the more esoteric config options).

#xmbdfed

I fixed the vfont import on xmbdfed so it can import in both Sun and VAX format (Big- and Little- endian), and also in mono- and proportional spacing (proportional spacing fonts previously didn't get the correct widths and bearings, but there aren't any in the SunOS distribution).

https://codeberg.org/drj/xmbdfed

Thanks to @me_ for finding vfont format fonts on the Sun tapes.

That now means i can correctly import the chess.18 font from the 4.2 BSD distribution and use it in xedit to create a fantasy chess position, in which the good birbs (rooks) and horsies are protected by the workers from being coerced into the wars of church and state.

#xmbdfed

Good morning. Does anyone have any files that begin with the bytes 0x01 0x1E ? They are Sun vfont files (binary bitmap font), and i would like one or two for testing xmbdfed.

The ones in the vfont.tar.gz file from the 4.2BSD distribution https://tuhs.v6sh.org/UnixArchiveMirror/Distributions/UCB/4.2BSD/ being with the bytes 0x1E 0x01; they are the little-endian version and i have those.

Please boost into the 1990s.

#SunOS #bitmapFont

when did you last compile an X program @neilbowers ? ^^

I've added Imakefile support to xmbdfed. So if you are the sort of person that compiles X11 programs, i would be delighted if you could try building xmbdfed with

xmkmf
make

from this repo: https://codeberg.org/drj/xmbdfed

and please let me know how you get on (successful or not).

#xmbdfed

Knowing how to grep for something that starts with a « - » doesn't come up much, but it does come up now and then. If i want to find which lines mention « -lfreetype », i can't do

grep -lfreetype *

but these both work
grep -e -lfreetype *
and
grep -- -lfreetype *

-e explicitly gives a match expression as the next argument so it doesn't matter if looks like an option;
-- is the traditional POSIX way to finish option processing and declare that all subsequent args are in fact true args and not options.

#Unix #grep

How old a Unix (-ish) operating system do you use on the weekly? For me it's probably the aforementioned Thinkpad X250 running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS which i should probably update (to NetBSD!). Do any of you nerds use anything truly old regularly? Like OSF/1 or SunOS 4?

Please boost for reach.

(use case: i am wondering if i should convert the xmbdfed(1) man page from man macros to mdoc(7))

#Unix

i, a git user of some 13 or more years now, successfully performed the rebase that i wanted on first try, using only the man page for reference. I am honoured to accept whatever internet points you wish to award me.

My plans for xmbdfed (BDF bitmap font editor) https://codeberg.org/drj/xmbdfed are:

- soon a maintenance release 4.7.4 ish (4.7 was the last release, in 2004), basically my current changes wrapped up, which are mostly making it compile and removing bugs for a modern system;
- then later moving towards making it simpler by removing options. So if you actually use it and dearly love some non-default option, say so now. I'll probably change the bitmap editor to be more MacPaint-like too.

#xmbdfed

FAQs from the 1990s on Unix-adjacent subjects are incredible. "How do i [relatively harmless sounding thing, like a busy cursor]?" Answer: blah blah blah 1,000 line C program... "it's really that simple, it just works!".

Oh, "discovered" the Motif FAQ https://users.polytech.unice.fr/~buffa/cours/X11_Motif/motif-faq/ ; which might be tomorrow's reading.

Honestly, think Fediverse would be a great format for bringing back Usenet-style FAQs. Posted once a month on well-known accounts.