On Sun, Sep 15, 2013 at 08:47:32PM -0700, H. S. Teoh wrote: > - Its default escape sequence is extremely annoying (ctrl-A clashes with > bash's go-to-beginning-of-line, which I use literally *all* the time). > Switching it to something like ctrl-U makes it more tolerable.
I never really got into using C-a for start of line. I just use the home key. (I prefer the arrows to hjkl too!) > - It doesn't seem to pick up terminal settings correctly sometimes. > Which results in needing to set $TERM manually, or type > `TERM=rxvt-unicode program args`, instead of just `program args`. > Quite annoying. Yeah, I've had trouble with this too and got around it by messing with .rc files. My .vimrc if $TERM=='screen' set ttymouse=xterm endif for example. (There's more $TERM hacks in there too.) I also changed the escape when puttying in to C-s. The main reason is the laptop's keyboard is laid out differently, so the same finger position for C-a on the desktop hits s on the laptop. But a second nice benefit is I can nest screens: use the C-s to switch top level ones and then screen -d -r my project screens, and C-a them. Pretty boss. My putty shortcut on the laptop also runs screen -S -something laptop, thus creating a screen if needed and reattaching if it is already present. So whenever I open that putty window, it goes right back to where I was... and of course, screen -r laptop works on the desktop too if I forget to handle something. Really convenient, and works across network disconnects. I love it. > Whoa, that's a lot. I usually have only 3-4 things open at a time, The thing with me is I kinda hate closing things. If I leave it open, then when I finally get around to looking at it again, I can kinda pick up where I left off. Otherwise, I'll forget it even exists! There's also some of them open just to be command shortcuts. So if I want to rdesktop into the client's Windows server, instead of looking up the address and getting all the redirections again (not as hard as it sounds, i have a file called USEFUL with various things too), I just hit win+7, up, enter. > Heh. I used to have *three* X servers running, keyed to vt7, vt8, vt9, > for 3 simultaneous login sessions, multiplexed by xdm. I still use xdm oh man i haven't used xdm for a while. I used to have a cool diskless terminal setup in my house. Old pentium 1 computers whose hard drives died repurposed into netbooting from my linux box. (BTW there was a place where getting xorg.conf right was a pain! Not to mention other nfs and kernel stuff. I saw more kernel panics while setting that up than I saw blue screens of death in the time I used windows 95.) But then I could just hit the button in the other rooms and get a nice X login screen presented, and my same blackbox based desktop a few seconds later. I liked it. But with my last desktop hardware failure - a bad power supply killed the motherboard - I decided to finally dive into a 64 bit kernel and with that came updated distro that killed the whole diskless setup. Maybe some day I'll redo it, but I don't really remember how it worked and don't want to spend days figuring it out again. I'll just stick to my Windows laptop :< > (Why multiple sessions, you ask? 'cos at one point I was experimenting > with different WM setups to see which one(s) I like better, but I still > wanted to continue working on whatever it is I was working on without > interruption, so having multiple copies of X running allowed me to keep xnest is pretty cool too for playing with window managers. > getting interrupted and dropping back to the Linux consoles.) Linux consoles rock so much btw. I really enjoy the time I spend on them - when the above mentioned motherboard died, I went back to my old computer for a while and since I was accustomed to Linux by that point, I passed on the Win98. But, that computer was too slow to run the bloated X11. So I just used linux consoles. And it was *awesome*. 1) I had most the same programs I use all the time anyway, but now they were prettier! I really like the way vga text mode looks. 80x25 is a bit small, but it is workable and really beautiful. 2) I used some text mode replacements for other graphics programs, like naim instead of gaim. Worked pretty well, though I didn't stick to it once I fixed my newer computer. (Did however write my own p2p messenger that was beautiful and didn't have AOLs servers to depend on. Sadly, I lost it though, the people I chatted with refused to use it :( Now one of them wants to get on custom stuff again, thanks NSA, but I can't find that code. Meh, eventually I'll just rewrite it in D anyway. (The original was written in C.)) 3) Less idiocy with incompatible terminals. TERM=linux believe it or not, just works, everywhere I tried it. I'm tempted to go back to that for a while, but I probably can't avoid needing to open something in gimp or firefox for a couple weeks straight anymore. > TBH, I'm still not quite happy with the choice of escape sequence. If I > had my way, I'd rather have <windowsKey> <F1..F12> instead. Maybe one of > these days I'll write a D replacement for ratpoison that does just that. Probably not too hard to just hack the source. > (Ratpoison does let you configure the escape key, but it doesn't work > with <windowsKey> for some stupid reason). xev tells me the Windows key's keysyms are keycode 133 (keysym 0xffeb, Super_L) keycode 134 (keysym 0xffec, Super_R) The bbkeys program I uses calls it Mod4 in its config file. Maybe one of those names will help? > Yeah, people can rant and rave about how Linux sux and what-not, but the > fact of the matter is, I could run 3 copies of X11, each with 15 windows > open on a Pentium with 128MB RAM, and be fully functional, whereas it > takes every last drop of juice the system's got just for Windows'98 to It's not even the memory that is good for me: it is the more efficient layouts. The Windows taskbar gets unusable with more than about 10 windows (especially on XP+, where it hides entries or combines them. Ugh, the point of the taskbar is that everything is visible at once!) > lets you use a minimal WM should you choose to, rather than in Windows > where you *have* to use whatever MS has decided everyone must use, and you can do that in Windows too, actually, though of course it is rare to see in practice.