today's howtos

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 06, 2022

• How to Extend Vim's Functionality by Adding Plugins

  Being one of the most popular text editors, Vim also influences other modern text editors. In fact, the Microsoft Visual Studio Marketplace has a Vim extension for VS Code; it has over 4 Million installs.

• Our unusual traditional /var/mail setup for people's inboxes

  If you go back 30 years ago, IMAP was not really very much of a thing. Most people read their email by logging in to our Unix servers and running various Unix programs, and these programs read people's mailboxes in traditional Unix format from /var/mail (or perhaps it was /var/spool/mail at the time). Because we had a multi-server environment even back then, this /var/mail lived on one server and was NFS-exported to all of the others. When a POP and IMAP server was added at some point, it had to play along with this environment and so it was configured so that the IMAP INBOX was your /var/mail inbox (although your other IMAP folders went in your home directory). And because people's inboxes were directly exposed as files, people could and did write procmail rules files that directly appended incoming email to them (with appropriate locking).

  Today, almost everyone reads their email through IMAP and few people have procmail rules any more. If we were starting a new environment from scratch, we might well allow only IMAP (or POP3) access to your email and not store your INBOX in /var/mail (although we'd need to expose some sort of flexible per-user mail filtering). But we aren't starting from scratch (and 'few' isn't the same as 'zero'), so we still have our traditional /var/mail, complete with it being NFS mounted on all of our general use Ubuntu servers.

• Day 7: subgrids

  It’s time to get me up on speed with modern CSS. There’s so much new in CSS that I know too little about. To change that I’ve started #100DaysOfMoreOrLessModernCSS. Why more or less modern CSS? Because some topics will be about cutting-edge features, while other stuff has been around for quite a while already, but I just have little to no experience with it.

• Day 8: nesting :has()

  It’s time to get me up on speed with modern CSS. There’s so much new in CSS that I know too little about. To change that I’ve started #100DaysOfMoreOrLessModernCSS. Why more or less modern CSS? Because some topics will be about cutting-edge features, while other stuff has been around for quite a while already, but I just have little to no experience with it.

• Testing TCP Connectivity with curl - Invidious

• How to Tag a Docker Image - Invidious

• How To： Edit System Files in Linux with vim - Invidious