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How I use my terminal

(jyn.dev)
538 points todsacerdoti | 4 comments | 23 Jun 25 15:14 UTC | HN request time: 0.308s | source
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happytoexplain ◴[23 Jun 25 17:28 UTC] No.44358032[source]▶
The entire blog post being in lowercase distracted me more than I thought it would.
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1. furyofantares ◴[23 Jun 25 18:35 UTC] No.44358677[source]▶
Kids these days. That's how many of us who grew up online in the 90s to early aughts have been doing things for 30+ years.

I think many of us abandoned it when we went professional. Or abandoned it in those contexts but still do it in others. I don't do it on HN, clearly - but I do it almost everywhere else. It's much more natural to me to skip capitals.

I believe there was also a period in the transition to ubiquitous smartphones where it wasn't an option to turn off auto-caps, or maybe there just wasn't the fine-grained control of which auto-correct you use on mobile devices that there is now. I suspect that killed some all-lowercase habits. I think that's why I ended up with a "normal" style on HN where I use caps and normal punctuation (I don't usually use periods for sentences that terminate a paragraph outside of HN.)

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2. happytoexplain ◴[23 Jun 25 18:53 UTC] No.44358847[source]▶
I'm 40, but the only place I have ever abandoned proper casing is in the specific case of single-sentence text/chatroom messages (and later, 4chan posts), where I also omit the period. And even then, I only abandon sentence-casing - e.g. "I", proper nouns, etc are still capitalized. I never adopted that style in other places though, like forums. And I'm definitely not used to seeing entire chunks of prose in this more extreme version of that format (no uppercases at all, rather than just no sentence-casing).
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3. furyofantares ◴[23 Jun 25 19:17 UTC] No.44359082[source]▶
Well I certainly didn't say all of us! Most people our age didn't live their whole life on forums/IRC/etc and even those who did, didn't necessarily pick that up. But also many of us did! I don't recall any forums back then where everyone did it; but I don't recall any where nobody did either.
4. globular-toast ◴[24 Jun 25 06:29 UTC] No.44363373[source]▶
I never wrote full sentences or capitalised in my msn messenger convos. I'm not sure if I always did, but certainly at some point I started capitalising my IRC messages. Still don't always write in full sentences, though.

For me it wasn't about being professional, it was just about learning to type. As my typing speed improved it just became second nature to capitalise where appropriate. In other words, I capitalise everywhere out of laziness.