What's better about the T440 compared to the successors up to the T480? I'd consider the T440 a low point due to the lack of TrackPoint buttons.

You could quite easily use a t420 keyboard in a t440 with a few pins masked which was the last traditional thinkpad keyboard.

Actually I may be getting the numbers wrong, it could be the t430 that I was thinking about. It's been rather a long time since I did any brain surgery on thinkpads.

> "git oldest-ancestor brancha branchb" does what it says.

The oldest (common) ancestor of two revisions would typically be the initial commit. I assume your alias really finds the last (most recent) common ancestor. But are you aware of the `git merge-base` builtin? Your alias looks an awful lot like it.

Oh, yes that's exactly what I really meant. Whoops.

I'll check out merge-base tomorrow, thanks for mentioning it!

> I had to have a multi-day argument over the precise way to define constants in Perl

Couldn't you have used whatever the other person was suggesting even if the change was pointless?

These days, I would, yeah, but this was a long time ago and I was a lot more invested in not letting nonsense go past without a fight.

Yeah it's one of those things where it's like...

...okay, I can let this nonsense go today with very little impact, but if I do... will the team need to deal with it 100 times in the future? (And more broadly, by silence am I contributing to the evolution of a bad engineering culture ruled by poor understandings?)

It is very very difficult to know where to draw the line.

Three axes in my mind to take into account: Likelihood, impact, and complexity. The article seems to mostly be about likelihood and complexity. I'd place more importance on impact and complexity. It's worth saving a headache later if it's simple to do right now, however unlikely it is, as long as it doesn't create a maintenance burden before that point.

Wasn't reStructuredText the one where you can't make text a link if any of it is bold/italic/monospaced? IIRC, nesting of inline markup is generally not possible. It works in Markdown…

I had to scroll way too far to find this. All the arguments for RST are about how much more expressive the language is, how much care was taken in making it an abstract document tree. Yet there are simple trees you can't encode, even common ones that markdown handles fine.

I'm not using a language simply because it was aiming at something better, if it missed the mark.

Right, this is the one fairly clear down-side of RST, in practice I've found it's never been an issue - but it does seem like a strange constraint.

If you really want you can define bold italic text using some styling magic, but that's quite awkward.

> IIRC, nesting of inline markup is generally not possible. It works in Markdown…

How do you write <i><b>x</b>y</i> in Markdown (without using HTML tags)?

_**x**y_ works fine, I tried on GitHub: https://gist.github.com/remram44/8cd460aef9020aa53d538b82cb4...

Oops, I forgot that underscores are a thing :D

Maybe Markdown doesn't allow arbitrary nesting of inline markup, but the combinations I actually wanted so far work. With reStructuredText, OTOH, I ran into limitations even though I didn't try to commit typographic atrocities.

Yes, and this sucks.

I tried figuring out whether Firefox can be made to never open a new tab in response to a normal left click on a link. The advice I found is setting `browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction` to 0 and `browser.link.open_newwindow` to 1 in about:config [1]. But it works a little too well: clicking on a link outside of Firefox also no longer opens a new tab.

[1]: https://superuser.com/questions/260129/open-link-in-the-same...

There's one more detail along the lines of theme changes in other tabs and theme preference changes from the OS/browser: activating the correct theme following history navigation. When I navigate to another page of the author's site, change the theme from light to dark, and then use my browser's back button, I get the light theme again. On my own site I use the `pageshow` event to fix this (https://github.com/meribold/meribold.org/blob/afe6885/_inclu...).

The extra effort is only needed on Firefox and Safari, though. Chromium already handles this somehow.

Some more good ideas for Readline configuration: https://www.topbug.net/blog/2017/07/31/inputrc-for-humans/

To make Less (the pager program) behave a bit more as if it used Readline (it doesn't), one can create a `~/.config/lesskey` file with these contents:

  #line-edit
  ^A home
  ^E end
  ^F right
  ^B left
  ^P up
  ^N down
  ^D delete
  ^W word-backspace
  \ed word-delete
  \ef word-right

I think a relatively recent version of Less is required.

Holy GOD all these years of wasting time on HN have finally paid off!

THANK YOU FOR SHARING THIS

Mine has an ASCII cow to keep you motivated and accountable: https://github.com/meribold/muccadoro.

just tried to run it and it says i dont have cowsay command which is just an output of a text based cow with a cartoon bubble

So far on my M1:

1. I tried to install Pomoglorbo, fails due to python requirement

2. Scrolling down I find muccadoro, fails due to dependency

3. 10 minutes in im feeling the impact and inefficient

4. Should've just kept moving

This looks nice. I added a package to the AUR: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/elles-bin.

And here's one that builds the latest code from the Git repo: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/elles-git.