Disappearing * character

Apropos of nothing, Splat on a Macinosh historically refers to the “snowflake” or command key… ⌘ (<— That char is probably messed up if you’re not an Apple device) The keyboard shortcut for copy is often described as splat-c. I’ve always heard the asterix referred to as “star” in Solaris and UNIX circles. Not disputing your claim…we’re just speaking different dialects.

rm -rf *.* is the magic incantation that solves all of your current problems…best run as sudo[1]

My late friend Bill had a funny story about that…a mistake he made while (trying to) remove (only) the test database while using a locally-mapped keyboard at a client site on what was supposed to be his last task, on his last day…in Switzerland.

I mean it was funny later. When he told it. After they let him leave. We all laughed heartily.

He had an even funnier one about being deported from South Africa. Somebody had to tell the Bank President that he was wrong. Better the consultant than someone on staff.

I miss Bill. Great photographer too.

[1] If you don't know why this is funny, don't try to solve your problems by typing that command into your terminal. Just don't. You've been warned.

I always called that Mac key “pretzel”.

I’ve never heard it called that (that I can recall)…but I see how you got there. Consider it added to my lexicon.

Just use the magic lasso, then pretzel-c the selection onto a new layer…

That's because this forum (like most modern sites on the Internet) uses Markdown, and asterisks are one of the special characters used for it. In the reply box, there's a question mark in the top right corner, clicking on it shows you the syntax that Markdown uses. If you want the asterisk (or any special character) to be shown, the backslash is the escape character for it.

\*like so\*

More on Markdown if you want to read: daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax

Thank you for the explanation, I had figured as much, and if this is the best editor possible so be it. On the other hand it seems somewhat primitive to use common characters as special characters, more like '70s than '20s.

One person’s primitive is another’s design goal…

~ Daring Fireball: Markdown

Emphasis added by me.

I understand jaberg, and I don't wish to demean Gruber's work. However, horses for courses. Today there are many other editors out there, some of which could possibly be better suited to a multimedia photography forum. Perhaps we could be inspired by something a bit more sophisticated than plain text email ;-)

The advantage, for me, is that I write Markdown natively, intuitively, and quickly. I have no objections to other systems, but it would be my preference that Markdown continue to be supported.

I first saw a VDT 20 months after joining IT. 😁

I've used cards and TTY working on IBM mainframes
(and a DataEntry staff for punching the main stake of my programs )

.

.

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... then the first PDP arrived ...

Cool Alain, my first real job involved two PDP-11s embedded in a truck :-)