Command Line Renaissance
by Kendall Clark
In my work and home computing setups, I’ve been enjoying a Command Line Renaissance lately. Consider:
- I’ve never been happier or more productive with email since I switched to a combination of sup, offlineimap, screen, and Emacs.
- For programming, which I do less and less these days—to the great delight of coworkers on at least two continents!—it’s git, ditz, gvim, and Emacs. Build tools are enjoying a flowering lately, so I’ve been looking at zc.buildout and
Paver. I read the Vellum docs last night; way, way too much of the wrong sort of attitude. - For building real docs, LaTex, of course, and rubber.
- For music, mpd and ncmpc. Very nice solutions, these.
- For shell, fish and the most pager. Nice.
- For monitoring, htop. Love the htop!
- For news reading, I tried to love snownews, but failed; right now I’m using Liferea. I want to eval Raggle and TheYoke.
- I’ve been mulling a switch in Gnome to a tiling window manager like xmonad, awesome, dwm, ion, or Ratpoison. The problem here is too much choice. I wish the LazyWeb would just tell me which one of these is best with Gnome.
- Oh, I forgot: for IM and IRC, finch and irssi, respectively.
- And for Twitter, I have to decide whether I want to tweet more from Emacs or vim. Each has a simple, embedded Twitter client.
- For todo list management, trying to choose between Dev Todo and git-todo-py, leaning toward the latter.
- Related: I’ve been gradually moving some work from Emacs to gvim; I’ve never really made a serious attempt to live in vi, and I’m really enjoying it. For example, making 12 pt Consolas the default font in gvim took one simple line of configuration that I found in less than 1 minute of googling. Sweet.
Just about the only GUI programs I still use regularly are Firefox and Emacs; although, Firefox has really been infuriating lately because it leaks so much damn memory. I’ve switched to the 3 beta series to see if memory consumption improves.
This command line rebirth is probably just one of those phases necessary to sustaining my interest in using computers all day, every day, especially since I really, really hate them. But it’s also the case that as I get older, with a baby at home, and many more things to do each day than hours to do them in, I want to maximize my productivity.
Anyone else trending this way?