[ILUG] General Advocacy

[Paul Mc Auley]

Given that I had a couple of nightmarish days (don't ask) when I went to 
catch up on my mail/usenet there were 150+ new ILUG messages. Which means 
that I'm only now getting to the whole mail/editor thread stuff...

But:

1. Mail

Exmh and procmail. Accept no substitutes. I started off on BSD mail (1987),
moved to mh until I got tired of the fun and games involved in replying to
original content, moved to ream. Moved to exmh. Started using slocal. Moved
to procmail. These days I have way too many folders up to about four levels 
deep, and I can still track them using exmh. If I have to use terminal mode,
I can still fall back to mh commands...

2. Editors

VI. The first UNIX editor I ever used. I am somewhat mystified by people who 
say that vi's commands are too cryptic and that they use Emacs instead. It 
isn't a coincidence that Emacs is sometimes called 
'Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift'. In my time I have had brief flings with 
ed/tpu and Emacs. However I only have room in my fingers for one set of 
keystrokes, and I can run a version of it on my Psion. Vim (which I build 
with athena) has plenty of the features that once attracted me to 
Emacs (split display, syntax highlighting).

3. Distributions

Call me backward but I only really see dists as a starting point for a
system. I am inclined to fetch a source tarball for critical software
and build it too keep pace. After all, who wants to rely on the canned
kernel?

4. Window managers

All right, so I'm an old fart who nearly didn't escape tvtwm. But I think
that fvwm2 will do pretty much everything I want.

5. Usenet software (not that it was brought up but what the hell)

Slrn + leafnode. Does pretty much everything I'd want out of an offline
reader. Once upon a time I quite liked Agent. (I still do, when I'm
marooned in Windows land but I don't tend to boot MSWindle much other than
when I have to).

6. Mice

Logitech Mouseman Wheel. So it's a wierd shape, but five minutes in you
will have permanently adjusted. So you think that the wheel is a pointless
marketing feature. Once I'd read the relevant howto and applied the
changes, I was addicited. I didn't realise how hard it had taken until I
was trying to use it on other non-wheeled mice. The bizarre thing is that
I'm left-handed but still use my right to work the mouse...
	Paul.
-- 
--- Paul Mc Auley                   Do you actually like haggis?
--  pmcauley at iol.ie     No, I think it's repellent in every way. In fact,
-                        I think most Scottish cuisine is based on a dare.
                                    -- So I Married An Axe Murder