this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2023
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Linux
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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What is ^[ here? Do you literally type that I to the keyboard? Or is it the ANSI escape sequence for Ctrl or something.
I hate whenever I see something binded to the square braces, does not work properly for qwerty or is at least impractical.
Ctrl-[ is escape in ASCII (not specifically ANSI/VT100/etc), and Ctrl is sometimes abbreviated as ^.
I don't know the exact history of why this is a thing that comes up with vi often. My guess is that ESC on the ADM-3a terminal that vi originally targeted influenced it. On ADM-3a, ESC is where tab is on a PC-101 keyboard, a comfy key to hit while touch typing. When later terminals started to move ESC a couple of rows up it was more ergonomic to hit ctrl-[ instead.