Ok, but you listed a tool outside of the editor (grep). In this game, you dont get access to tools outside of the editor except a very limited “test” command.

You are 100% correct that it is possible to write code with only a plain text editor. It’s how I got started. Pico + man pages (vi didn’t make sense and I couldn’t exit it anyway so avoided it for a while), but even with “just a plain text editor” I still had access to other tools like a compiler and its output, etc,m but we’re not talking about programming on a normal system here. It’s a game inside which you type code as part of playing the game.

If you look up screen shots for the game, you’ll see what looks like a shell, but it only has a very small number of commands, so you don’t have the tools you would normally have outside of the text editor (like grep). Can you search multiple files in the game? Yes, switch the editor between each file one by one (it has tabs) and search. Would a better in game editor improve that experience? I’d say yes. On a normal system you could get around edutor linitations by using tools outside the editor like grep. This isn’t a normal system. It’s a fake computer inside of a game and you don’t get the typical tools outside of the in game code editor.

There may be some tricks that a JS developer would know to use inside the game, but I’m not a JS developer. That also means i need to look up JS standard functions and syntax outside of the game. Having it in game would be a better experience for me but not a requirement. I got pretty far in the game. I’ll probably go back to it as newer ADHD obsessions allow.

It sucks even more than usual in the “game” because the code editor lacks what I’d expect in terms of syntax highlighting, jumping between functions, finding references, errors, undefined variable usage and such. Maybe those features are available, but I didn’t know how to access them and I’m no JavaScript expert so a proper IDE (even embedding codium) would have saved me a lot of frustration. I didn’t finish it. I think I got about 2/3, but I thought it was an interesting concept. So overall, I liked the concept of EmuDevz and a different language would have probably made it a better experience (as would a better code editor).

If this is of interest, you may also like EmuDevz. It’s free on steam or via browser (maybe other options). I started the steam version before finding out of the web version. Gist is you make a NES emulator, but they don’t call it that exactly in the “game”.

https://afska.github.io/emudevz/

1. Why not both? Packaging multiple releases, documenting, and support is lessened with a single release. Officially supporting more ways to install is extra time and effort that is considerably worse with PHP than applications written in most (maybe all?) other popular languages due to the variety of ways people can configure PHP and how the web server executes it is huge and trying to support all of that is considerable. Even if you just narrow down to a single http server, there’s a lot of variations just how the http server executes the scripts and that’s ignoring the PHP/PHP extension level differences. I can’t think of any popular languages that are worse or even in the same ballpark as PHP on execution environment inconsistencies.

2. The existence of the docker release doesn’t prevent you from running it outside of docker and the Dockerfile/image serves as a reference implementation. It provides you the exact steps and working configuration to deploy it outside of docker.

Consider a PHP application with install instructions, you follow them and it doesn’t work due to some non obvious configuration difference. With the docker image you have a reference of what should work and can use that to narrow down what is different between your PHP install/configuration and a working system.

If you’ve not run in to these kinds of situations, consider yourself lucky. It was a nightmare back in early 7.x releases and older.

Years ago I’d have one PHP app that required version X of PHP and another that required version Y and my distro often only had one of them (or you couldn’t install both simultaneously), so I’d have to either compile myself (or later use a 3rd party repo). All solvable of course, but then throw in MySQL version requirements and PHP extensions and it’s just extra crap that containers just take care of for you. I’ve had this kind of inter app requirements conflicts with stuff other than PHP, but I’ve had by far more of it with PHP. For a while I used FreeBSD jails to help, but jails was kind of a pain. I enthusiastically embraced docker for PHP stuff early on.

A benefit for application developers, particularly PHP is there’s a lot of differences between distros and how people install and configure PHP. Even like which PHP extensions are available and their settings. Other languages things tend to be more consistent at the system level and customizations are app are usually application level (contrast with PHP extensions and system level configurations). It really helps reduce support issues due to distro/user differences if a developer just provides a working dockerfile as a reference implementation and in my experience this is far more likely with PHP than other languages. I realize this is mostly applicable outside of PHP, but I actually personally see more benefit with PHP based on my past experiences.

While most (maybe all?) TVs actively prevent this, there have ben security flaws that allow you to gain root and go from there. A few years ago I saw my TV+firmware combo was rootable, but newer firmwares patch it. My point is that while you probably can’t just install on your TV model, there may be a security flaw that allows for root access that can be used. It’s also possible that it’s not rootable now, but someone will find a way to jail break in the future. No one can really offer specific guidance without knowing the model and firmware version as whether it’s possible is most likley going to depend on both.

Example of one that worked for my TV (and other older LGs): https://github.com/throwaway96/dejavuln-autoroot It worked by exploiting a bug in the LG media player (I don’t know more specifics).