Brandon's Blog

12/21/2005

The New Hitlist

With the STL revelations of yore, it’s time to refocus, regroup, and start kicking some butt.  I have a beautiful Slack 10.0 minimalistic (yeah, even on Slack standards) install with X, flux, and gvim.  It’s like I step into a two-year timewarp and start coding.

I had to build SVN from scratch because I didn’t feel like downloading and burning Slack 10.2.  Welcome back to Slack, young dork.

I’m actually sticking the nuts out and learning the intricacies of vi.  I know I would hate emacs without even using it for more than five seconds.  My main weakness with vi is entering Insert mode in the various clever ways that actually enhance productivity.  I was universally issuing “i” commands, which insert before the cursor.  I just learned about “a” for append and “c” for change, which really help.  “o” automatically drops you a line and enters insert mode, which is often very nice.  I was basically crawling before, and now I’m limping.  I did get a regexp find and replace going yesterday while modding an apt sources.list file in Kubuntu before chucking the thing out the window.

SimplyMEPIS is a great newb distro.  I’m very pleased, and I think it will serve my family well as a “don’t want to risk a real computer on that website” browser/mail platform.  Especially since the Firefox transition here has been of the “wait n’ see” ilk.

The hitlist is as follows: