2026-07-31
I want to phase out my use of GNU programs/utilities on my PC.
Not for any particular reason, just out of curiosity.
I already use sbase which replaces the coreutils. My
plan is to (at some point) switch to Alpine Linux, which uses
busybox and musl. That deals with glibc and the GNU
coreutils. I can switch from gcc to
clang
I don’t really use GPG at the moment, and I switched from
bash to oksh a while ago.
The other big GNU thing I use is nano, which is
probably going to be the hardest to replace. I can’t find another
good, lightweight terminal text editor, that uses normal, non-vim
bindings, and has soft line wrapping. There is micro
but it’s a bit more intensive and doesn’t work great on super low
end hardware, although it would work fine on my current PC.
ne seems like a good option but doesn’t have line
wrapping. There is the super minimalist sandy
editor, but it would require a lot of patching to get it up to
pace with nano. Maybe I will use this as an
opportunity to switch to vim.
This likely a project for the future, as I will have to update
a lot of my scripts, especially otherPrograms.sh,
which compiles a bunch of programs. I might run into issues with
musl instead of glibc and
clang instead of gcc, and I’ll have to
update all the dependency installing, with an option for
apt and apk.