Category Archives: GNU

The GNU project, a free operating system project.

Make the less Command More Powerful

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Last updated on April 14, 2024

Due to its speed and simplicity, GNU less is probably the most common default terminal pager on various GNU/Linux distributions—you may have probably used it explicitly via the less command, or implicitly when you execute the man command or git diff. Although the default configuration of less does not really offer much except for a basic text viewer, it is actually much more powerful than most people think. Here a few improvements over the default configuration are offered.

For macOS/OS X users: consider installing a newer version of less and other GNU command line utilities. To do so, you can follow the instructions here.

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dired-quick-sort: Sort Dired Buffers Quickly in Emacs

2 Replies

Last updated on December 10, 2016

While Dired is great for browsing the file system, it is often annoying that the buffer is not sorted in the way we want to see. While Dired provides the flexible customizing variable dired-listing-switches, it is still not convenient to switch between different sorting criteria quickly. For this reason, I created the Emacs extension dired-quick-sort to make sorting Dired an easy story.

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Install and Use GNU Command Line Tools on macOS/OS X

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Last updated on December 13, 2017

If you are moving onto macOS/OS X from GNU/Linux, you would probably find out that the command line tools shipped with OS X are not as powerful and easy to use as the tools in Linux. The reason is that macOS/Mac OS X uses the BSD version command line tools, which are different from the Linux version, while they are both compliant with POSIX standards. But we can easily install the GNU command line tools by using Homebrew in Mac OS X and set them as default.

Note: you need to notice that you may have some compatibility issues with shell scripts written specifically for OS X after you have replaced your OS X commands with the GNU version. Although the very vast majority of shell scripts have no problem, you just need to be aware that when there comes a problem, this may be the spot to check on.

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