huf [he/him]

i’m afraid it’s M$ or MiKKKroSSoft. your choice.

they liked 90s russia, when it was weak, full of child prostitutes and people were dying en-masse from substance abuse (and the barn doors were wide open so they could loot it)

i’d probably do

function cap() {
        prename 's/(^[a-z]?)/\U$1/' "$@"
}

it means it has to be invoked as cap *, but it also means that you can do cap foo* or whatever

when you create the alias, the shell substitutes the $1 (to nothing, probably) since your alias is in "" (double quotes).
now, if you swap the single and double quotes, then the substitution still happens, but at invocation time instead of at definition time.
you actually want perl to deal with this $1, so neither is good.

you have three options:

• write a function instead, as has been suggested
• use $'' quoting, which lets you put ’ (single quote) inside ’ (single quote) without going mad: alias cica=$'foo \'$bar\' baz'
• go insane and do this: alias cica='foo '\''$bar'\'' baz' (this is the old way, without bash’s $'')

IIRC microsoft got got about this in the ie6 days or so, looks like they found their way back to their old behavior

none. you dont need a DE, you can just run a tiling wm and some terminals…