Month: February 2020

Were you looking forward to reading an exciting blog post about substantive technical issues affecting GNOME or the Linux desktop community? Sorry, not today.

When setting up new machines, I’m often frustrated by lack of syntax highlighting for git commit messages in vim. On my main workstation, vim uses comforting yellow letters for the first line of my commit message to let me know I’m good on line length, or red background to let me know my first line is too long, and after the first line it automatically inserts a new line break whenever I’ve typed past 72 characters. It’s pretty nice. I can never remember how I get it working in the end, and I spent too long today trying to figure it out yet again. Eventually I realized there was another difference besides the missing syntax highlighting: I couldn’t see the current line or column number, and I couldn’t see the mode indicator either. Now you might be able to guess my mistake: git was not using /usr/bin/vim at all! Because Fedora doesn’t have a default $EDITOR, git defaults to using /usr/bin/vi, which is basically sad trap vim. Solution:

$ git config --global core.editor vim

You also have to install the vim-enhanced package to get /usr/bin/vim, but that’s a lot harder to forget to do.

You’re welcome, Internet!

Were you looking forward to reading an exciting blog post about substantive technical issues affecting GNOME or the Linux desktop community? Sorry, not today.

GNOME

It used to be an acronym, so it’s all uppercase. Write “GNOME,” never “Gnome.” Please stop writing “Gnome.”

Would it help if you imagine an adorable little garden gnome dying each time you get it wrong?

If you’re lazy and hate capital letters, or for technical contexts like package or project names, then all-lowercase “gnome” might be appropriate, but “Gnome” certainly never is.

Red Hat

This one’s not that hard. Why are some people writing “RedHat” without any space? It doesn’t make sense. Red Hat. Easy!

SUSE and openSUSE

S.u.S.E. and SuSE are both older spellings for the company currently called SUSE. Apparently at some point in the past they realized that the lowercase u was stupid and causes readers’ eyes to bleed.  Can we please let it die?

Similarly, openSUSE is spelled “openSUSE,” not “OpenSUSE.” Do not capitalize the o, even if it’s the first word in a sentence. Do not write “openSuSE” or “OpenSuSE” (which people somehow manage to do even when they’re not trolling) or anything at all other than “openSUSE.” I know this is probably too much to ask, but once you get the hang of it, it’s not so hard.

elementary OS

I don’t often see this one messed up. If you can write elementary OS, you can probably write openSUSE properly too! They’re basically the same structure, right? All lowercase, then all caps. I have faith in you, dear reader! Don’t let me down!

GTK and WebKitGTK

We removed the + from the end of both of these, because it was awful. You’re welcome!

Again, all lowercase is probably OK in technical contexts. “gtk-webkit” is not. WebKitGTK.