I still use the ancient bash on macOS. And the jq that happens to be there, which I think was new in macOS 26? (WWDC hinted it would be in macOS 15, but IIRC it wasn't)

I honestly had no idea that emacs ever shipped with it.

This is probably as good a place as any to ask: why does the macOS vi return a nonzero exit code when I make any error at all? Like if I search for text that doesn't exist in the file, or mistype at the : prompt, and then (successfully) save and quit, it returns 1. This is bad when I'm using it as the editor for something like git commit, which will fail if $EDITOR returns nonzero. No other vi/vim seems to behave this way.

reminds me of a funny anecdote from my first job in the tech industry. all of the team's VM's had VIM installed, but no emacs. when I asked a teammate if we could add emacs to the bsse image, he responded "It already has an OS, we don't need another one."

`EDITOR=mg` is a great find. I never knew of it before! One caveat I found is that it doesn’t support unicode (at least not in the default mac installation).

Very interesting article. But why does Apple want to avoid GPL v3?

edit: found this previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20102640

Gotta reduce the bloat somehow.