reminds me of a funny anecdote from my first job in the tech industry. all of the team's VM's had VIM installed, but no emacs. when I asked a teammate if we could add emacs to the bsse image, he responded "It already has an OS, we don't need another one."
`EDITOR=mg` is a great find. I never knew of it before! One caveat I found is that it doesn’t support unicode (at least not in the default mac installation).
I still use the ancient bash on macOS. And the jq that happens to be there, which I think was new in macOS 26? (WWDC hinted it would be in macOS 15, but IIRC it wasn't)
I honestly had no idea that emacs ever shipped with it.
This is probably as good a place as any to ask: why does the macOS vi return a nonzero exit code when I make any error at all? Like if I search for text that doesn't exist in the file, or mistype at the : prompt, and then (successfully) save and quit, it returns 1. This is bad when I'm using it as the editor for something like git commit, which will fail if $EDITOR returns nonzero. No other vi/vim seems to behave this way.
The situation has gotten more complex since that discussion, too. Modern versions of macOS use an immutable root partition [1]; shipping GPLv3 code in that partition could arguably be a violation of the license.
reminds me of a funny anecdote from my first job in the tech industry. all of the team's VM's had VIM installed, but no emacs. when I asked a teammate if we could add emacs to the bsse image, he responded "It already has an OS, we don't need another one."
Boom!
`EDITOR=mg` is a great find. I never knew of it before! One caveat I found is that it doesn’t support unicode (at least not in the default mac installation).
Sadly, it doesn’t in any installation. Too bad, it’s great otherwise.
https://github.com/ibara/mg#commonly-asked-questions
I still use the ancient bash on macOS. And the jq that happens to be there, which I think was new in macOS 26? (WWDC hinted it would be in macOS 15, but IIRC it wasn't)
I honestly had no idea that emacs ever shipped with it.
This is probably as good a place as any to ask: why does the macOS vi return a nonzero exit code when I make any error at all? Like if I search for text that doesn't exist in the file, or mistype at the : prompt, and then (successfully) save and quit, it returns 1. This is bad when I'm using it as the editor for something like git commit, which will fail if $EDITOR returns nonzero. No other vi/vim seems to behave this way.
> This is bad when I'm using it as the editor for something like git commit, which will fail if $EDITOR returns nonzero.
I got hit by this so often and never knew the reason. At least I know who's to blame now.
Very interesting article. But why does Apple want to avoid GPL v3?
edit: found this previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20102640
The situation has gotten more complex since that discussion, too. Modern versions of macOS use an immutable root partition [1]; shipping GPLv3 code in that partition could arguably be a violation of the license.
[1]: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/signed-system-volum...
Gotta reduce the bloat somehow.