Top all-time · #8699
The Neo-Babbage Files
Personal blog · babbagefiles.xyzprogrammingsystems
The Neo-Babbage Files is a personal blog at babbagefiles.xyz about programming and systems. Since 2018, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 12 times, most often “Trials and Visions of Internet Relay Chat”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-11-09, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link these posts for the history of the Quake-style drop-down terminal, a Zork/MDL discussion, and making Emacs usable on Termux. Comments cite them as sources rather than judging the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /quake-drop-down-terminal-history/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-05-21
- Trials and Visions of Internet Relay Chat2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-04-01
- Browsing the web with Common Lisp2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-10-24
What Hacker News says?
termux on android can run emacs (for making it more usable, see: https://babbagefiles.xyz/termux-extra-keys-emacs-org-roam-no... )
Comment linking /termux-extra-keys-emacs-org-roam-node-android/
on “Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life”Submitted Lambda Calculus and Lisp, part 1 as a story · 107 points
HN discussionIn addition to appearance, there are of course potentially other constraining factors in font choice, depending on your use case. For instance, I need a good 'editor' font which is both monospace and supports combining diacritics well, for writing papers in LaTeX in Emacs. And I need good 'display' fonts for the PDF output of those LaTeX documents, which also of course have to support a wide range of combining diacr…
Comment linking /beautiful-and-free-typefaces/
on “Times New Roman alternatives: You can do better (2013)”Submitted Lambda Calculus and Lisp, part 2 (recursion excursion) as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI believe Yakuake/Kuake for KDE first introduced it some 20 or so years ago. I’ve been using it since its early days on Linux. EDIT: looks like someone even investigated that: https://babbagefiles.xyz/quake-drop-down-terminal-history/
Comment linking /quake-drop-down-terminal-history/
on “iTerm2 and AI Hype Overload”Submitted Browsing the web with Common Lisp as a story · 4 points
HN discussionOne can also try out the original mainframe/PDP-10 version of Zork, running the original MDL code, on a modern computer, see: https://gitlab.com/emacsomancer/confusion-mdl for relevant source for the MDL interpreter / https://babbagefiles.xyz/zork-confusion/ for discussion.
Comment linking /zork-confusion/
on “Zork and the Z-Machine: Bringing the Mainframe to 8-Bit Home Computers”Submitted Trials and Visions of Internet Relay Chat as a story · 3 points
HN discussion"Quake terminal" has been a term of art for a regular terminal that drops down from the top of the screen like the terminal in Quake did for the last 20-22 years. I remember this being a thing when I started using Linux back then. https://github.com/Guake/guake https://babbagefiles.xyz/quake-drop-down-terminal-history/ Yakuake, Kuake (2003), etc.
Comment linking /quake-drop-down-terminal-history/
on “QuakeNotch: Quake Terminal on your MacBook's notch”Submitted Browsing the Web with Common Lisp as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI’m not sure if other terminals support this feature[0] because iTerm was the first one I discovered with it and I haven’t tested all of them yet, but I use it for the global, Quake-style[1] terminal that slides down from the top of my screen as an overlay on top of whatever I’m doing. [0]: https://babbagefiles.xyz/quake-drop-down-terminal-history/ [1]: https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/18380429971797580...
Comment linking /quake-drop-down-terminal-history/
on “Warp terminal – no more login required”Submitted Trials and Visions of Internet Relay Chat as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
