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Friday, December 10, 2010

My Christmas wishlist - redcar and desktop Linux

And we are back by fofurasfelinas from flickr (CC-NC-ND)

Who would have thought my blog would be so high on OSX vs Linux. Well, this subject never gets old, so here's another instalment.

For personal reasons which Facebook aptly calls "It's complicated" I haven't had much time to update this blog recently.

I have so many things I'd like to write about - but marginal utility of time keeps getting in a way - with a lot of my previously free time no longer available, I have to make decisions which of too many things I'd like to do I should drop or postpone, hopefully starting from the least important of them.

And just like nearly everybody else, I keep confusing important with urgent - this blog is never really urgent - no cat will die if I leave writing for another day or week - but it surely is not the least important of all things I could be doing, or have been doing in the last month or so. So quadrant two, here I come!

Macs suck

GPU in my MacBookPro failed, so I'm temporarily back on Linux, on a desktop box which I was using mostly for gaming.

I will probably stay on Linux for quite some time, even after I get my laptop back. And they're really slow with repairs - I will forgive them only if they keep my hard drive undisturbed like they promised - my backups were not terribly up to date (about a month old) and what's worse - didn't include everything (just imagine - I don't have kitten picture downloader compatible with the most recent flickr API and I have to download kittens manually!). Now I backup everything to two independent external USB disks just to be sure, so I was prepared for this kind of backup failure, but I don't backup as often as I should - mostly because dual backup is such a pain.

Anyway, all cost of switching from one system to another must be paid up front - all the time necessary to setup and upgrade the new system, to change my habits and so on. Once the cost is paid (and with this post it will mostly be so), I can as well continue using it - so I might very well wipe out OSX and install Ubuntu on the laptop once I get it - I haven't decided it yet.

Well, first here's the list of the most important things how Linux (kUbuntu, old install upgraded to 10.4) is way better than OSX:
  • Polish Dvorak keyboard, thanks to divide. I kept meaning to write one for OSX, but never quite did it. You can write keyboard layouts for OSX as XMLs these days, but sadly there seems to be no way to get XMLs of existing layouts as starting point.
  • apt-get. Seriously, MacPorts is such a pile of fail compared to apt-get, it's just ridiculous. Imagine that - with apt-get you can upgrade system without breaking anything. It just works! I know, it's crazy!
  • I mostly develop for EC2, so quite a few things are easier on Linux than on OSX.
  • konsole and virtual desktops completely destroy Terminal.app and Spaces.
Sadly from this point it only gets worse.

Rum Tum Tugger by Trish Hamme from flickr (CC-NC-ND)

Desktop Linux sucks


When you keep using the same system for long, you stop noticing some problems - you just get used to them, just like Congolese got used to malaria.


And this is actually a big fucking deal. People "in charge" of desktop Linux - be in GNOME, KDE, or whatever - are mostly old-timers. They got so used to all the fail present in desktop Linux, it doesn't seem like a big deal to them.

The last non-Linux system they used regularly is probably Windows XP or something even older - they have only very faint idea what progress the closed source world have made with OSX and even Windows 7. Did I ever mention I sort of like Windows 7? Not for development of course, but you just don't see fail jumping at you all the time like it used to be on XP and Vista.

Anyway, the first impression I had once I switched from OSX to KDE was:
Are they fucking trying to reimplement Windows XP here?

I am deeply disturbed by what I've seen. KDE not only lacks all the awesome new stuff you get in OSX, it also lacks all the awesome old Unix stuff you get in OSX.

Let's start with the basics - a text editor. Control-A and Control-E don't work. A shortcut as convenient as Control-A instead does something as incredibly useless as selecting entire document. Control-E seems to do nothing. Just like Control-D. Control-K deletes entire line, which is broken, but at least only halfway so.

Fine, whatever, I thought - Windows noobs also use KDE, and if they want such broken shortcuts it's their problem - I'll just go to keyboard settings and switch to Emacs mode.

It's such a shame I haven't been recording myself, as the very moment I realized they removed Emacs mode I produced such an awasome stream of Polish and English swear-words that you could write a research paper about bilingual cursing based on it.


And amazingly, even mcedit lacks Emacs keybindings these days. How is it even possible that even the supposedly most noob-friendly operating system OSX has standard Emacs keybindings, but Linux doesn't even support them as an option any more? It doesn't even seem possible to set them up shortcut by shortcut.

At least they still work in konsole+bash, and in gtk-based programs if you add gtk-key-theme-name = "Emacs" to your ~/.gtkrc-2.0.

Unfortunately even that much barely works. In some contexts Control-F means forward, in some it means search. Control-W changes meaning between close tab and delete previous word - it's an unreliable mess.

They way OSX does it is simple - one modifier key (Control) is used for text editing, another (Command) for application control. I understand Linux cannot really follow this way, but would it really be that difficult to have a single global mapping between key presses and actions?

When you think about it most programs use the same shortcuts:
  • text editing (control-A, control-E, ...)
  • copy&paste (command-C, command-V, command-X)
  • undo stack control (command-Z, command-Y)
  • document/tab control - save (command-S), load (command-L), close document/tab/window (command-W), new (command-N) etc.
  • switching between tabs - command-1/2/3/..., control-pageup/pagedown etc.
  • application control - let's not get into application/window/sdi/mdi mess, there's time for everything and it isn't now - mostly quit (command-Q)
  • window control - maximize, minimize etc.
  • system control - like switching between windows/applications, making screenshots, locking screen, some dashboard, start menu, volume up/down/mute - the list is pretty long, but they're global by definition
There are very few applications that really need more than a few important shortcuts to this list. Some of them are important applications (Office, Photoshop, Emacs), but you'll be mostly using these anyway.

I would be surprised if GNOME/KDE lacked infrastructure for this (what's gtk-key-theme if not half of this?) - it just that nobody bothered doing this consistently. Or if they did, their efforts were blocked by some old-timer whose last recollections of life outside desktop Linux is Windows 3.11.
My Christmas wish: Good keybindings for Linux that won't make me miss OSX, or Linux from a decade ago.

It cannot be that hard, as Linux used to have those before losing them very recently.
Kočka z Mincovní by abejorro34 from flickr (CC-NC)

Redcar

Let's continue the story. Kate and gedit were various levels of unusable due to keybindings, as was mcedit in Emacs mode which I mostly use over ssh instead of real Emacs. I could try the actual Emacs, but after a few years of TextMate it just isn't the same. Not even close.

Fortunately the totally awesome Daniel Lucraft wrote a TextMate-like editor in JRuby redcar. Every time I check it it gets more and more awesome, and it's safe to say it's already far better than any other editor you can get on Linux.

Of course I wouldn't be myself if I didn't start bitching. So here's my quick list of easy improvements to redcar.

Any of these will make a great Christmas gift for me:
  • Context menu absolutely needs TextMate-like "Filter through command" features and all its options (mostly "input selection / output selection", "input selection / output create new document", and "input document / output create new document", but others are occasionally useful as well). This is easily one of top five most useful features of TextMate ever and it's really not that hard.
  • Getting a lot of common bundles/plugins/snippets/whatever-else-it-is-using with a single command. Batteries included you know.
  • Tab size control really needs to be visible by default. I'm sure this is one of the first thing requested by half of the redcar users, so why not just do it?
  • Support for Control-A and Control-E, seriously. Patch on github.
  • Syntax highlighting often breaks. Now making it unbreakable would require massive architectural charget, but can we at least get easy refresh shortcut, or refresh on switching tabs (if edited since last switch)? Most documents are not that huge, so it shouldn't be a major performance problem, right?
  • Does it really need to create .redcar directories everywhere? It creates ~/.redcar/ already, won't that be enough?
  • Unixy interface like mate command. Right now starting redcar ~/some/dir from console makes it stay there and keep producing java.lang.IllegalArgumentException stack traces. It's definitely a good thing for developing redcar, but would it be possible to get some command line switches to make redcar fork away like mate command does?
  • TextMate-compatible Control-K - it should delete everything between cursor and end of line (right), or delete linebreak if cursor is already at end of line. Right now in redcar pressing Control-K multiple times doesn't do anything useful. Patch on github.
  • Can we get some sort of 2D selections? Even Firefox has them for tables with control-mouse. I understand they might be too hard architecturally, but it would be pretty awesome. Ctrl+B does exactly that already.
  • Control-T (search file) should ignore spaces like in TextMate. I know this behaviour is irregular, but it just makes so much more sense to me to search for "login ctr test" like in TextMate than for "loginctrtest" redcar wants. By the way history for Control-T is pretty awesome.Patch on github.
  • Search and replace within selection.
  • Not in TextMate but would be awesome: support for filtering by full path with Control-T, like login/index.
That was a lot of bitching - but then isn't this exactly what this blog is made for?

Yes, I'm aware of official redcar wishlist and I might convert some of this bitching to requests and maybe even - imagine that - patches (I've been doing quite a lot of JRuby lately, so I'm no longer scared of JVM). Just not now. Marginal utility of time, "it's complicated", delegate if possible and so on... You know, the usual excuses for not contributing.

EDIT: I fixed a few easy ones at github.

I'm not done yet


Silly me, I thought I would be able to include my Ruby standard library wishlish in this post - this will have to wait, there are two weeks left so I might find an evening for that as well - and that will be a ridiculously long list - and judging from reactions to my preliminary post about Ruby stdlib it will make everybody hate me even more than they hate me now.

So just a few minor additions to my Christmas wishlish, just in case robot Santa or spirit of Kwanzaa or your personification of gift giving of choice happens to be deluded enough to think I was nice enough that my wishlist so far is somehow not yet long enough:
  • Is there anything like OmniFocus for Linux?
  • Sound system on Linux is still broken in 2010. Skype mysteriously cannot find my microphone, even after spending far too much time trying various alsamixer and Skype options. Rebooting to Windows on same hardware - zero problems, works out of the box. Can we please get this?
  • System settings are just dreadful. Why cannot we have everything in one place, instead of some options in General, some in Advanced, some inside various programs, and some who knows where. This has always been a big weakness of Linux, but total lack of progress is disturbing. Even something as simple as telling Linux to automatically mount an external disk is nontrivial - in dolphin there's nothing like it in context either on disk icon on sidebar, or disk mountpoint directory in /media. Searching "usb" or "external" in system settings also returned nothing. It turns out I need to switch to "Advanced" tab and search for "removable". I seem to recall this used to work far better than that, but maybe that was GNOME. Is anybody working to improve this situation?
By the way is there any major reason for using KDE versus GNOME these days? It used to be so that GNOME had much worse Windows-itis and hypernoobemia than KDE, but these days I'm getting the impression that noobness rankings changed from Mac > Windows > GNOME > KDE to Mac > Windows > KDE = GNOME > Mac. Yes - somehow Macs dominate both total noob and expert user part of the spectrum.

Or actually - the person who does the most to fulfil my wishlist gets to decide KDE vs GNOME for me.

    33 comments:

    Daniel Lucraft said...

    Re: Redcar. Glad you are mainly positive!

    And you really should number your wants, makes it much easier for Santa to respond appropriately.

    1. Yep, see (a) below.
    2. Yep, see (a) below.
    3. Hah, want to fight about it?
    4. We have that on OSX, not sure about the situation on Linux. But I agree sounds like they should be there.
    5. Refresh shortcut, nice idea. I'll try and get to that. Also need to do another round of fixing on that sucker anyway.
    6. The project specific .redcar dirs are there for you to put project specific redcar config in. You can put runnables in there currently for instance, and I want to make it possible to have project specific commands and such. People actually check them in because they are useful to different people. Lots of potential there, so we're sticking with them.
    7. If there's a running Redcar, it will connect and open it there. If not, you can pass the --fork option. (Not the default yet because of concerns about windows behaviour.)
    8. YES, see (a) below.
    9. Press Ctrl+B and try selecting a block.
    10. Yes, see (a) below.

    (a) Nice idea, want to implement it? I can give hints in IRC.

    taw said...

    Re 6 - I do mate /some/directory all the time, including for one-ofs. And for things like mate /etc. And for all of ~/foo and ~/foo/bar and ~/foo/bar/blah and ~/foo/bar/blah/wut.rb

    Opening directory in TextMate is really more like opening a directory in Finder.app than like creating an Eclipse project, at least the way I use it.

    Right now .redcar seems to be just tags - something that would probably work better in global cache file anyway.

    Yes, I know about (a). I'm trying to inception some of them into your subconsciousness right now, so it will be less work for me. It works occasionally :-p

    Anonymous said...

    Your main complaint appeared to be:

    "an editor which isn't emacs doesn't behave in exactly the same way as emacs".

    KDE has standard shortcuts for most of the items as you discussed. It's part of a set in the library called KStandardAction to make sure each application not only implements the same shortcuts but they can also be configured together in systemsettings.

    Kate has pretty damn configurable shortcuts - and a plugin infrastructure (most notably in 4.5 - 4.6), that has the potential to take on TextMate

    Anonymous said...

    "System settings are just dreadful. Why cannot we have everything in one place"

    It is. It moved in KDE 4.5

    taw said...

    Anonymous: These are not just for "editors", and it's not about turning everything into Emacs - nearly every single application requires some kind of text input, and on OSX and until recently Linux basic shortcuts like Control-A/E worked just fine.

    Like I said in my post, I tried it, and System Settings does not support reconfiguring what I need here, at all.

    Kate has about as much of a change of taking on TextMate as the most recent Nokia of taking on iPhone. The only people you ever hear making such claims are those who never seriously used TextMate (or an iPhone).

    taw said...

    Daniel Lucraft: Oh, and 11. search-and-replace within selection. Not the most important feature ever, but it is sweet, especially when used together with regexps. (but then filter through command can do that as well)

    taw said...

    Anonymous: You mean really everything? Like everything everything, not just half of it and the rest hidden away? That would be really neat.

    I'm using KDE 4.4 now, but I'll upgrade when new kUbuntu is released anyway.

    Unknown said...

    Gives Scribes a try. I'm not sure if it fits your needs. It doesn't hurt to try it.

    Disclaimer: I'm the developer of Scribes.

    http://scribes.sf.net/

    taw said...

    Mystilleef: Scribes is pretty, but it seem to have more in common with nano or Notepad than with TextMate. There's nothing wrong with that, it just isn't what I need.

    Unknown said...

    @taw: Funny, my users often compared it to Textmate.

    Comparing to it to Nano and Notepad is cold.

    taw said...

    Mystilleef: Am I missing something? It seems to open one file at a time, and mostly just basic text editing functionality.

    Do they compare it to TextMate because it's pretty? Do you have any screencasts of Scribes doing awesome stuff? Surely you've seen some for TextMate, right?

    Unknown said...

    Don't jugde scribes by it's ultra minimal user interface. :-)

    Scribes has about all the useful text processing facilities you'll find in VIM and Emacs.

    In comparison to Textmate, it has snippets, automatic completion, abbreviation expansion, bracket completion, quick open, recent open, remote editing, automatic indentation, smart indentation for Python, automatic error checking for python, recent open (I don't think TextMate has this), RE search and replace, bookmarks, instant document switching, and a lot more. It's also extensible via Python plugins.

    I don't know what features in Textmate you seek in other editors outside the Emacs key bindings you listed in your blog.

    There's a few screencasts on youtube, nothing spectacular and also on the Scribes website (that screencast is old).

    I need to warn you that Scribes is "unorthodox" in its approach to text editing. If what you're looking for is Textmate on Linux, then that's not Scribes at all!

    Scribes is a completely different text editing experience. You can try it. If you don't like it, sorry for wasting your time.

    taw said...

    Mystilleef: Well if you have any really good screencasts, post them here.

    A simple thing that TextMate can do I requested in this post - selecting a portion of text, and filtering it through some Unix command (like Perl one-liner). Can Scribes do it?

    I intend to convince dan to implement that in redcar, or failing that implement it myself. But don't tell him about the second part ;-)

    Unknown said...

    taw,

    I don't have any really good screencasts. These screencasts were created by fans.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hiF7vNeOUI

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMiWa9xEPak

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky2dTo80_4U

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXzD0J4bgZE

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ym6mDz_gN80

    This is the official screencast on the website. But it's about 5 years old, I think. A lot has happened since then.

    http://scribes.sourceforge.net/demo.htm


    >A simple thing that TextMate can do >I requested in this post - >selecting a portion of text, and >filtering it through some Unix >command (like Perl one-liner). Can >Scribes do it?
    >

    No, it can't. It's very easy to implement. But your shell environment is infinitely better at that kind of stuff than any text editor ever will. And I've never seen any convincing reason to use external tools inside a text editor.

    If you really want the feature in Scribes, open a bug report and give a compelling use case scenario. I'll implement it if I'm convinced.

    taw said...

    Mystilleef: This is exactly what I'm talking about in this post - unless you use TextMate regularly you don't really get it what so awesome about it. It will look like a bunch of disconnected pointless features until you try. Try explaining to someone with BlackBerry what's so great about iPhone and you'll get similar reaction.

    Anyway, there are at least two (not terribly good) screencasts of this feature:

    http://screencasts.textmate.org/filter_through_command.mov

    http://vimeo.com/12239312

    Plus a few thousand blog posts.

    There's no alternative for this feature - if your text editor doesn't support filtering selection through command - you cannot use shell for it. Shell only filters entire files at once reasonably. And even then you lose undo, command history, you'll have to switch windows, manage mess of temporary files etc.

    Not to mention how useful it is for automating common editor operations.

    It also naturally bridges between only using an editor and developing plugins for it. No wonder TextMate gets so many plugins written for it, while nearly no other editor does. (try developing plugins for Eclipse sometimes, great fun it is :-p)

    Unknown said...

    I don't think pipe processing impresses any seasoned Linux/Unix user. We've only been doing this since the 70s. :-)

    That feature exists in about every popular text editor on Linux.

    If I felt motivated I could implement it in 30 mins in Scribes. But alas I don't use the feature enough to warrant spending time on it. And I don't recall anyone requesting the feature.

    Textmate has a huge mind share on OS X. That's why many plugins get written for it. You can say the same for VIM and Emacs on Linux.

    My qualm with Textmate is that it's as complicated to use as VIM and Emacs. I used Textmate when I had an ibook a few years. I got the impression that it was Emacs with a pretty user interface. Given Emacs legendary status, that's a compliment.

    Anyway, you don't need to look far to find that features in the popular linux editors.

    taw said...

    I don't think pipe processing impresses any seasoned Linux/Unix user. We've only been doing this since the 70s. :-)

    I don't think you understood me on what it does - you can pipe selection, not just entire document at once.

    Imagine you have some Javascript embedded inside HTML file and you want to reindent it. With TextMate you can just select Javascript part with mouse, and pipe it to Javascript reindenter (input: selection, output: replace selection).

    Without TextMate you'd have to: cut that part to new document, save as temporary file, switch to shell, run command, open this new document, copy all, paste back into original document, switch back to shell to delete both temporary files.

    This would just be ridiculously slow.

    TextMate just integrates with Unix amazingly well.

    Another neat Unixy things you can do with TextMate but very few other editors is piping directly to TextMate like this: diff -u foo bar | mate -

    Then you can edit this diff, save it somewhere, or do whatever you like with this.

    Or another trivial thing - when you do mate /etc/hosts if you want to edit and save, it will ask you for sudo password at save time. scribes just opens in read only mode (and no, you should not run GUI programs as root obviously).

    Unknown said...

    It's trivial to make Pipe processing work equally well for files and strings. In fact, in many cases, it already does. Many command line apps accept both strings and files as argument.

    I'm positive applications like Gedit, Geany, VIM, Emacs, Snaked, etc allow selective pipe processing via an external tools. I know VIM and Emacs do that for sure.

    The command line processing that Textmate does is nifty. In fact, I might consider implementing them in Scribes. Gedit used to do that a few years ago, but I tested with the new versions and it doesn't anymore.

    Users shouldn't be allowed to edit files they have no immediate privilege to access. It's a well known usability and security principle. These files should be opened in readonly mode to prevent accidental modification. Explicitly elevating the users privilege level is much saner and safer.

    gksu scribes /etc/host

    taw said...

    Mystilleef: What happens with selection processing is moral equivalent of popen2, writing contents of selection to one end, closing it, and reading output on another end (in two threads or with select or something to avoid blocking i/o).

    gedit definitely doesn't have it. Emacs might, but it's not obvious where and how (as usual with Emacs).

    By the way there's a lot of things TextMate can do that Emacs cannot. For example no editor I know other than TextMate supports arbitrarily nested content types - like javascript within html within php, all automatically. Even Emacs cannot do that. For TextMate this is basic stuff.

    What TextMate does for root files (fork and sudo file saving process only) is far safer than gksu. You cannot "accidentally" modify them, as you'd be prompted for sudo password if you tried. gksu's approarch to security is more or less insane as far as I can tell.

    By the way I'd definitely prefer if Scribes and all other editor stole the best 20% from TextMate, and reimplemented the other 80% each in a different way - TextMate isn't perfect.

    Unfortunately people who haven't used TextMate enough don't know which 20% to steal, and people who use TextMate a lot don't want to switch to anything else if they can help it. So we're in a very bad equilibrium.

    Unknown said...

    > gedit definitely doesn't have it. Emacs might, but it's not obvious where and how (as usual with Emacs).

    They both have it.

    See the external tools manager in Gedit.

    http://live.gnome.org/Gedit/ToolLauncherPlugin

    So do Geany, Scite, Jedit, Snaked, and more

    > By the way there's a lot of things TextMate can do that Emacs cannot. For example no editor I know other than TextMate supports arbitrarily nested content types - like javascript within html within php, all automatically. Even Emacs cannot do that. For TextMate this is basic stuff.

    So does every GtkSourceView2 text editor including Scribes.

    > What TextMate does for root files (fork and sudo file saving process only) is far safer than gksu. You cannot "accidentally" modify them, as you'd be prompted for sudo password if you tried. gksu's approarch to security is more or less insane as far as I can tell.

    How so?

    > Unfortunately people who haven't used TextMate enough don't know which 20% to steal, and people who use TextMate a lot don't want to switch to anything else if they can help it. So we're in a very bad equilibrium.

    Everybody's 20% is different. Clearly the 20% that get you
    excited, judging from this blog entry, barely tickles my
    fancy.

    I need 3 things from my editor.

    1) A transparent user interface that absolutely gets out my
    way. The less GUI the better

    2) Extensive text processing and navigation functions
    preferably inspired by VIM.

    3) Smarts:
    i) lots of automation, everything that can be automated should be
    ii) syntax and semantic error checking
    iii) automatic code completion or any kind of smart completion.

    Everything else is a bonus. I'm not trying to belittle the
    features you love about TM. Just saying everybody's 20% is
    different.

    taw said...

    Mystilleef: Features I listed are mostly tiny things missing from redcar. redcar gets most of TextMate's most important features right already.

    I wrote patches for three of them already and I've never seen redcar's sources before, they're that tiny (at least the ones I fixed).

    Unknown said...

    @taw,

    I believe you. Like I said those features are very easy to implement in any text editor that has a good plugin system.

    I might implement them in Scribes just for fun.

    Unknown said...

    I implemented both features in Scribes.

    Youtube Video of Filter Through Command in Scribes:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4x1ABnPu3c

    I also implemented input/output redirection from the command line.

    So you can do the following.

    diff -u text1 text2 | scribes -

    Don't care for Emacs or VIM keyboard shortcuts, sorry.

    taw said...

    Mystilleef: Awesome. I hope you'll find this feature a lot more useful than you thought at first.

    Anonymous said...

    And the fact that linux editors implement "search" (ctrl + f) separately from "replace" (ctrl + h) is totally stupid. I switched from Mac to Ubuntu earlier this year and I share many of your pains. I had been using KDE initially and had been changing all the keyboard shortcuts for every single application to use [Super] key to mimick Mac's [Cmd] key (Settings → Configure Shortcuts…), but ultimately I settled with XFCE for a desktop environment. Not perfect, but I am approaching the critical mass to start fixing GTK applications and contributing to their code bases. I had funny moments with Evolution for my calendaring needs. At first it looked ugly and I thought that there has to be something closer to iCal's or Outlook's usability. Evolution turned out to be the best available on Linux anyway. Thunderbird + Lightning/Sunbird/Spicebird for some reason didn't want to import my ICS files. Anyway, I ended up using only evolution's reminder service and adding events and reminders in vim to its config files so that I can quickly use preset alarm configurations. And have you considered using geany, bluefish, vim, emacs, joe, pyroom, jedit, ed, nano, mcedit, pico, netbeans, eclipse, anjuta, kdevelop, mousepad, aptana radrails, zend studio, activestate komodo, rubymine, kwrite, kate, gedit, scite or freeride apart from redcar or scribes?

    Or gnote, tomboy, kjots, knotes, zim or rednotebook for notetaking?

    And have you got any experience with BBEdit on Mac?

    Anonymous said...

    And if you're in London, you can pop over at Canonical's HQ http://www.canonical.com/

    taw said...

    Anonymous: I've never used BBEdit.

    I've tried enough of the editors you mention and they all fail hard. Some very very hard.

    Market Research said...

    Your analysis is good. I have a suggestion, from the next time try providing the ranks( based on your analysis out of 10) which will give the reader a complete idea of your test.
    Regards

    jwhendy said...

    Interesting post. Could you name any Linux DE developers who fit your bill for "old school" and likely used Windows XP and have since remained cut off from the DE world and it's increasing "awesomeness"?

    You seem to complain a lot about your distro. Have you tried others? I didn't stick with [k/x]ubuntu because it seemed bloated and stupid. Trying to uninstall add-ons from Gnome once broke my whole system because the group "gnome-desktop" or whatever wasn't satisfied. I couldn't believe it wouldn't boot because I'd removed some add-ons. And, no, it didn't remove anything else, just those packages. Then it blew up because it's dependencies weren't met.

    I've now been on Arch for about a year straight and absolutely love it. I know where everything is, what it's doing, etc. Pacman is fantastic. Prior to that, I was extremely happy with Zenwalk. I moved because it didn't have a 64bit variant. Salix OS was also interesting and I played around with it.

    Anyway, just some suggestions. It won't run out of the box, but with the Arch Wiki, I can be pretty much completely setup in less than a day from scratch.

    I just googled "polish dvorak keyboard os x" and found THIS as the top hit...

    I also dual boot a MacBook. Backup is a snap. Rsync from Linux -> HFS partition and then I use Carbon Copy Cloner to backup OS X now and then.

    Unless you really want a full clone of Linux, I'm not sure what's difficult about backing up the two.

    Anonymous said...

    Chciałem zrobić to szybkie komentarz do powiedzenia Cieszę się, że znalazłam Twojego bloga. Dzięki

    Anonymous said...

    If you want Emacs bindings on a Linux text editor that bad, why not use... Emacs?

    Traumeel said...

    In the third pic, cat much looks like doing cat walk.. Isn't it... Looks to cute... but why is she angry..??


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    Macrobid said...

    hi,
    all photo images are very nice. and set up desktop image in computer.every cats are very cute...