chesheer

My name is Ivan.
I am: Christian, Russian, translator, in that particular order, probably.

Homepage: https://iyer.ru

Last Notes

2026-06-29 20:59:31 CEST

So I wanted to share with you this little project of mine. I delved into "retro-necromancy" and reanimated one very old UNIX utility called ile written by Robert Pendleton in 1988. I found it on one of the Walnut Creek source code CDs from 1994.
What it does is simply works like an input line editor (hence ile) for shells and programs that do not support interactive line editing. To put it simply, it adds Emacs-style keybindings like ^A, ^E, ^K, ^U and so on and command history that you can easily navigate.
Of course, these days it's hard to find a shell that doesn't support line editing.
But this little tool can still be usable, for example, with ed. It's nice to have Emacs-style editing in ed.
It can work like shell replacement or just run like a "middleman" between any given program. It respects terminal settings and doesn't get in a way. Keybindings are configurable.
Needless to say, the code from 1988 wouldn't run on any modern system. It was written in K&R style because there was no ANSI C standard yet! And #UNIX was quite a different beast back then.
So I ported it to modern systems, rewrote outdated bits (like sgttyb ioctls and brutal utmp handling).
Currently it builds and runs on #Linux, #OpenBSD, #FreeBSD and #NetBSD. Hopefully without too much bugs.
You can find it on Codeberg:
https://codeberg.org/chesheer/ile

2026-06-03 08:23:15 CEST

This is so Microsoft on so many levels.
Imagine buying Microsoft Office 2019 for your Mac. Perpetual licence. Just a good ol' software in a box (except without a box, I guess, times are digital).
"It's so great to own a real software and not a subscription", you think to yourself.
Now Microsoft basically says: "I'll do ya one better, pal. Now your Office 2019 will work in read-only mode. Hope you wrote everything you needed. Get a subscription already".
I didn't know you can do that. Sell a software and then just brick it with a proper announcement like it's the most natural thing to do.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/05/28/microsoft-is-killing-office-2019-for-mac-and-iphone-and-you-cant-do-much-about-it

2026-03-29 08:55:24 CEST

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I can absolutely understand it can do amazing and potentially groundbreaking things in some scientific fields if used right. Things we sometimes aren't capable of.
But I never understood why we need more code. We already have so much code no one probably ever read. And they want even more.
And then I remember they just want more money, and for them more money means more code... But when that money is spent what the hell are we gonna do with so much code no one will ever read?

2026-01-25 09:13:41 CET

Stumbled upon this golden joke that says volumes:
WinRAR is more profitable than OpenAI.

2026-01-22 12:25:22 CET

The Interwebs are full of interesting people. Like locksmiths who maintain #IRIX software distributions in their free time somewhere in the middle of Virginia.
https://media.bsd.cafe/bsdmmedia01/media_attachments/files/115/938/477/623/464/883/original/e32a4f586083e9c1.png

2025-05-08 08:25:54 CEST

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I love how crazy simple Slackware package format is. Just write a simple 11-liner, provide a file tree, pack it all in tgz, and you're golden.

2025-04-23 08:59:02 CEST

I've been using #Emacs for the last couple of months now for all my daily work (I'm a translator, not a programmer) and here's a thought.
Of course, I stumbled upon rather contrasting recommendations:
1) Don't use vanilla, use #DoomEmacs or #Spacemacs. Preferably Doom. Well, I tried this in the past, but it didn't stick. It''s everything and the kitchen sink, but you generally don't know if you really need all this. So you study Doom, not Emacs. I might get back to it in the future. I did prefer Spacemacs, though (aesthetically).
2) Use vanilla and spend ten years building your own config. This sounds fairly reasonable, because you naturally learn the program itself, not its plugins. But it's a huge timesink when you start to "build your own Emacs". So you'd end up with DoomEmacs, but badly written, slow and constantly breaking on every update.
I went with the second alternative and here's what I got for my personal usecase:
me@desktop:~$ grep "use-package" .emacs.d/init.el | wc -l
8
Eight packages. howm, inkpot-theme, which-key, avy, counsel, general, annotate, markdown-mode. I didn't even bother to make annotate work for now, so it's 7. And I don't really use avy, so it could be 6.
That's all I need for now. For several months I haven't had a moment yet when I thought that I need something else or that my workflow is getting somewhat cumbersome.
Of course, this doesn't mean that my setup is perfect. But my point is: configuring your own Emacs could be way easier than you might think (depending on the workflow), and you probably don't need to fight a bazillion packages waging civil war in your config file.