I had to go back over it a few times to understand. I believe its the number of branches at each depth level.

If you use vi mode then history can be navigated with hjkl.

Can you provide examples of this manipulative manner in which they are used? I'm having a hard time understanding your justification.

I also have a makefile and game genie code generator for this on github: https://github.com/nwoeanhinnogaehr/smb-assembler

In my experience J9 needs to be finely tuned to reach maximum performance for a specific use case other than enterprise application throughput. Try using the -Xquickstart flag if you want to improve startup time.