Title: Church of Technology Date: January 18th, 2001 Self Righteous: 7 Opinionated: 9 Simply true: 4 For the love of God, if you can find a girl who: a) knows what "root" is b) knows what to do with it c) lets you look at her naked by all means, give her ANYTHING she wants! - IntelliTubbie in a great Slashdot posting Like most power-geeks, I'm pretty opinionated about the tools that I use. For your viewing pleasure, here they are:

Operating System

Unix/Linux hands down. Macintosh is great for non-geek use, Windows is great for nothing.

Input

Flat keyboards are an anarchistic joke. I am in love with my Datahand keyboard, which completely rules in all aspects except mobility, for that I am starting to learn how to use the Twiddler

Output

I would love a flat-screen, or a HMD (head mounted display) when I have the money.

Hardware

Smaller and lighter is better, as demonstrated by this very server and my desktop which is a Shuttle (SS40G) Update: I do everything on my Thinkpad X1 laptop

Editor

completely rules. Emacs is nifty, if you like typing with all your fingers at the same time.
"alt-control-meta-leftshift-swastika-footpedal-numlock-delete"
It was put very well by David Korn (inventor of the Korn Shell):
"I think of an editor as a command that I can quickly start and leave and I think of the shell as an environment which holds state. vi fits this model better and that is what I use."

Incidentally, Korn also agrees with me about the two uses for shells: "There are two different areas of functionality in shells. First is interactive use and the second is scripting." - I personally can't understand why people keep mixing those two together

Shell

I have been happily using tcsh for my interactive shell. It's got great completion features that are customizable, something that ksh is terrible at. I used to use ksh for non-interactive shelling (scripts), but now I do all that in perl. I've been curious about learning zsh, which seems to have tcsh features as well as functions and better syntax, but with over 800 lines of customization in my various .tcshrc files...

Mail client

Elm is my favorite. I don't believe in graphical mail readers, maybe it's because I'm still tainted by my 14kbaud 80x24 modem days. I suppose that I should switch over to mutt someday, but I'd rather finish writing my own mail client first. Update: I'm on mutt now
"If you can't vi it, it sucks"

Languages

Perl rules. It is my favorite for fast development. Sometimes I can still be convinced to code in C in Java, especially if someone pays me. I'm learning Python and Ruby as well.. I despise C++. It is a foul language. Update: Ruby. Oh, sweet, beautiful Ruby

GUI environment

I used to be hardcore about my window managers. I took whatever was the most configurable, no matter how ugly. I went through all the twm spinoffs and spent a long time with fvwm2, creating configuration files over 1000 lines, but finally I discovered that Gnome/ Enlightenment is not only beautiful, but it's extremely configurable too. Update: Compiz/Gnome

Music Player/MP3

First XMMS, then and now I'm back on XMMS and a fan of the Nucleo_NLog_v102 skin.

xmms is especially cool now that it has song queuing and I've got the CD cover plugin working with a bunch of cover images.

Video

xanim is great, though for pure mpg I sometimes use mtv and lately I've been moving to mplayer thanks to mov support. Update: VLC, of course

Browser

I used netscape longer than most, but 4.7 was buggy and NS6 was so slow that I switched to Opera, which was dandy, but I switched to the nifty firefox for a bit, but now I think I'm back on Opera. It still has an annoying intermittent input focus bug that I wish they would fix, but I finally decided to become a registered user. Update: Chrome

Search Engines

Google, though back in the day I was a huge fan of Altavista and the once super-fastest HotBot.

HTML Editor

vim, for god's sake. Did I mention?
"If you can't vi it, it sucks"

FTP client

ncftp. If you don't use it, then you don't know what it is.

More Opinions
DaveFAQ