Holy crap. I didn’t think there was a human alive that could switch between emacs and vi regularly and voluntarily.
Proof that Mark Pilgrim has two brains.
Nice one Mark. I’ve added up mine too.
1:59 AM Neil: I feel a seminal blog post coming where you talk about config files and a thousand people flock to read it. If I did that the only comment I’d get would be from my sister asking what the fuck it all means!
I was right :-)
`sudo update-alternatives –config pager`, sir yes sir. Not too convinced by KSnapshot (I’m anal-retentive, I post process my screenshots in GIMP anyway); also, Bash *can* complete dirs over SSH, but I’ll give zsh a try one day (same for ratpoison).
Use ThinkPads, you’ll get your mouse in the middle of the keyboard!
— Shot 
zsh can autocomplete apt-get/aptitude queries.
bash too.
It can dynamically set captions in screen.
bash too, apparently.
It can do mindblowing things like autocomplete pathnames over ssh.
bash too.
zsh has a reputation for being bloated and slow, but who cares?
bash too :-)
— saharvetes
How about some screenshots? :)
Proof that the Linux Desktop (KDE/Gnome) is dead with a WM like ratpoison. ;)
I’ve been using dwm as my bloat-free desktop WM. Though you need to compile dwm to configure it.
I’m stealing some stuff of your .screenrc and putting into my configs. I would like to try zsh, though I am happy with bash.
I recommend `scrot` for screenshots. I use `feh` for a bg image if I want one and for general image viewing.
Good to see you here Mark. Best wishes,
Btw, it’s technically better to write the conditionals in your F12 script like so:
if ratpoison -c info | grep -c $foo 2>&- ; then
...
fi
That avoids spawning an extra subshell on each and every if.
Although this is so long that I’d write a function for it:
have_window() { ratpoison -c info | grep -c "$@" 2>&- ; }
if have_window $foo ; then
...
fi
PS.: be nice if your typographic smartening doodad skipped the contents of <code> tags…
The escape codes in your .zshrc have invalidated your feed.
— Anonymous
FYI, the escape codes in your .zshrc have invalidated your feed.
— random passerby
Fucking Wordpress.
— Mark
— Arthur
Another (generally) non-tiled window fan here too, using dwm here running on Xorg/FreeBSD. Two thumbs up for your comment on the usable lifespan of config customization for *nix apps - amortizing all that fiddling makes it dirt cheap.
dwm appealed to me more than its predecessor wmii which I used and it appealed to me more than ratpoison and other similar wms. Might have been the default keybindings, or window handling - can’t remember why now. Suspect it was the way wmii stacked windows initially but I grew frustrated with its slavish devotion to plan9 style configuration mechanics. dwm you edit a config.h and that’s it.
My dwm - vim style keybindings for moving around windows, moving windows. Zoom any terminal window with alt-space alt-enter. Handles floating windows well enough. Status line simply based on dwm’s stdin, so hack up a script in anything - I’ve got a small python script putting mpd | sysload | date time together.
Editing config.h for keybindings and the 5 second recompile and install works for me; most often a `pull` and `update` from dwm’s Mercurial repository and make install just-works. Thoughtful improvements continuously noted over the past year.
DWM is not xinerama capable on purpose, so I run dwm on two displays and xwarppointer assigned to ctrl-\ to flip screens.
— Mike
How do you manage to use Emacs effectively with your window manager stealing Control-space? Do you bind M-space to set-mark-command?
Cool! I have a trick similar to your f12 for my urxvts that works on any WM with the tool wmctrl, but it’s WM-independent:
http://technomancy.us/blog/post/65
I still can’t believe you don’t touch your .emacs… I thought regularly improving that was an essential part of the Dao of Emacs. Maybe after you’ve been improving it for ten years it could become hard to think of new things to do…
— Phil
Might not matter to you, but I like to have the load as the last line in my screen sessions:
defmonitor on
hardstatus alwayslastline "%-Lw%{= bW}%50>%n%f* %t%{-}%+Lw%
How about posting your .emacs file (and other custom emacs files)? I am a very recent convert from vim (3+ years) to emacs. I would love to see what your setup looks like.
— Peter
Mark A.: use caption always instead of hardstatus alwayslastline. This looks the same, but leaves the status available so you can also say something like this:
# pass hardstatus through to xtermtermcapinfo xterm*|rxvt* 'hs:ts=\E]2;:fs=07:ds=\E]2;screen07'
Then the title of the xterm displaying your Screen session can be changed just as if Screen wasn’t there.
Good call on most. I’m on a Mac, and have found that antiword + most handles the majority of my copy deck reading needs. Way better than firing up a GUI-based word processor.
regarding bash setting screen captions. The ‘trap’ command can trap bash events and attach commands to them.
“trap ‘echo hello’ DEBUG” traps the DEBUG event which fires *just before* a command line is executed - this prints hello just before it executes a command.
$BASH_COMMAND contains the name of said command.
echo -e “\ekHello!\e\\” will set your screen’s title to “Hello!”
Combining all these we have:
trap ‘echo -ne “\ek${BASH_COMMAND%%\ *}\e\\”‘ DEBUG
Tada!
Ah crap, I posted before i finished…
Just wanted to say I generally work in a similar fashion, though I really just use two(ish) applications - firefox and urxvt/screen. I do most things at the terminal simply because of the same concept you bring up - the ability to ‘pipe’ plain text around is lost in gui-land.
While a bit contrived, here’s a recent screenshot of how I actually work:
http://img.phraktured.net/screenshots/screenshot-20070305122500.png
Please note, the screen vsplit is in CVS. I don’t actually work that way, but screenshots are always flashier!
How do you copy/paste from [k|c]onsole to firefox? (The other way around I use Ctrl-C / Shift-Insert)
— Peter van Kampen
> less is better than more, but most is better than both.
Or to put it another way:
Less is more than more, but most is more than less.
:)
— Clay
Mark: are you still using Ubuntu, or did you conclude that gNewSense ready for primetime day-to-day use in the end?
— Anonymous
Actually I switched to Debian around the first of the year, on my primary machine. I have Ubuntu Feisty on an old laptop.
— Mark
> How do you copy/paste from [k|c]onsole to firefox
Pipe to /tmp/1, which I have bookmarked.
Embrace the minimalism.
— Mark
Any chance of an illustrative screenshot?
— Anonymous
> Pipe to /tmp/1
Heh, nice. I’ll have to keep that trick in mind.
— Bob Aman
How do you copy/paste from [k|c]onsole to firefox?
You select the text in the terminal using hold-mouse-button-and-drag, then middle-click to paste the selection. Just as god intended. This doesn’t just work with terminals, it works with pretty much any selectable text anywhere in X. I barely ever use the clipboard; when I’m forced to work on Windows, the absence of the select → middleclick gesture alone is enough to make me cranky.
You have a problem with firefox -remote ‘openURL(http://poop.example/)’?
— dbt
Doesn’t anyone else use CTRL-SHIFT-C to copy from gnome-terminal or konsole, and regular old CTRL-V to paste into Firefox? Maybe it depends on desktop-environment integration, but it’s been part of the whole Just Works thing that Ubuntu does since I first installed Breezy last year.