Red Echo

February 26, 2015

Renaming lindi

I wrote a little code editor some twenty-odd years ago which I named “lindi”, a partial acronym for some series of words I can no longer recall. I’ve long since lost track of the code as well as the meaning, but decided to reuse the name for my new retro-style terminal-mode IDE partly from nostalgia and partly because names are hard.

After a few months of steady use, however, I’ve noticed an unfortunate consequence of this particular name: it doesn’t autocomplete well, because there are too many other programs already named “lin*”. “lind”-tab is no shorter than “lindi”, so I end up typing the program’s full name every time I want to use it – which I do many times a day.

Being a fundamentally lazy person, I have therefore decided to rename my editor. I listed out all the unused two-letter prefixes on my system, then searched for various words beginning with those letters on github and the web to make sure they weren’t already used by other projects, and the winner is “ozette”, after the lake out on the Olympic Peninsula.

And now I’ve written a long blog post about an inconsequential design decision affecting a piece of software LITERALLY ZERO PEOPLE IN THE WORLD other than me have ever used! But I am amusing myself, and this is my blog, so I guess you know what you’re getting if you read it.

3 Comments

  1. Never underestimate the ability to amuse yourself! I’ve a bookmark from college that states “sometimes the only sense you can make of life is a sense of humor”

    Comment by Rachel — February 27, 2015 @ 6:43 am

  2. Personal-use software projects are the best kind of software projects. :)

    Comment by Micah Cowan — February 28, 2015 @ 8:35 am

  3. Will there be t-shirts with the new logo and a launch party?

    Comment by Pea — March 2, 2015 @ 12:57 am