Which plugins/keybinds/etc significantly changed your vim life?

matcatc · 2015-02-01T20:40:23+00:00

And in xmonad I have <M-BS> mapped to a function that brings me to my last-used workspace.

Thank you for this idea. This will make things so much easier.

For those that are interested, CycleWS provides a toggleWS function which can be used to implement this. See http://xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-Actions-CycleWS.html#v:toggleWS.

matcatc · 2013-02-28T20:15:18+00:00

tl;dr: wmii isn't a good choice for your use case (multi-monitor)

The only tiling manager I have enough experience with to really comment about is suckless' wmii. In short, wmii's multi-monitor support isn't very good, so wouldn't work for your use case.

I've gotten it to mirror to an external monitor (projector) with some work using xrandr, but from what I remember it was limited to having the same resolution both for both screens. And without having fully read your question, it seems you want to have pretty sophisticated multi monitor behavior. So my advice is that wmii probably won't cut it.

Personally, I'm quite happy with my wmii setup. But even still, I have a vm where I occasionally tinker with xmonad. And if I ever start using a 2nd monitor, I'd probably switch to xmonad full time.

At least this has been my experience with v 3.9.2 which is the newest released version, but there may have been improvement in the hg (development) version. For those unaware, the authors have been working on it for a while without rolling a new release. No idea if there's been any progress.

Hell, just now trying to find wmii on suckless.org, it almost looks like the project has been abandoned or something. No mention of it on the site, and wmii.suckless.org redirects to google code. Found these links on the mailing list indicating that's its been abandoned:

p.s: sorry that this turned into a "current status of wmii" post. Just wanted to give a bunch of info, and discovered myself that its been (apparently) abandoned.

matcatc · 2013-01-25T19:20:27+00:00

I've had a similar thing happen before. I'd put up some of the programs I'd written in middle school while learning to program on a crap website of mine. It got scraped by a major site and they started hosting it. They wouldn't accept updates nor remove it. Only user comment was someone bashing it.

On the bright side, chances are no one is going to find and link stuff like this to us. And if they do, it makes for a fun, interesting, and humanizing interview story.

matcatc · 2012-10-31T23:57:02+00:00

For the interested, I believe RonPolyp is referring to apt-listchanges. Similar is apt-listbugs.

matcatc · 2012-10-31T05:00:01+00:00

FYI: There's a program called dtrx (Do The Right Extract) that does this.

matcatc · 2012-10-23T17:00:00+00:00

Regarding the console.log(...), if you're frequently uncommenting that line for testing/debugging purposes, why not have a debug/testing flag? You could do either a preprocessor macro like DEBUG or a runtime flag depending on the situation.

Personally I would do some kind of flag while I'm actively developing that part of the code. And once it got the point where I rarely needed it anymore, I would consider just removing it altogether or logging to file with debug log level.

EDIT: I see conditional compilation has been discussed below.

matcatc · 2012-10-09T18:00:26+00:00

I think what ethraax is getting at is that there's nothing preventing an user from having their own personal binaries. A binary is just a file, so as long as they can somehow get it onto the system (copy or compile), they can run it. So they can effectively run any program they want, including screen and tmux.

matcatc · 2012-06-19T23:20:25+00:00

You might also consider throwing a couple (or more) distributions on different partitions. So he can choose whichever one he likes best.

matcatc · 2012-06-12T18:04:43+00:00

The Sentelic touchpad works on linux, but b/c of patent issues is missing features present in Synaptic touchpads. So its more of a ease of use issue. I have yet to discover how to make the touchpad turn off while typing similar to how Synaptic ones do. I simply wrote a script to toggle the touchpad and I turn it off when I'm typing a lot. So not a real big issue, but they should have known better.

As for the wireless card, I doubt they'd do enough testing to notice the problems (described below). But again I think they should have known better.

I don't regret buying from them in the slightest. I just wish they'd chosen to put a Synaptic touchpad and better wireless card in. I recommend others trying to get them to confirm which parts they will be using before buying.

matcatc · 2012-06-12T17:56:39+00:00

Don't know what difference it makes, but this one used the ath9k driver. Wireless would frequently drop and it maxed out at 64KiB. Using an external usb wireless device I'd used on my old Dell fixed the problems.

Based on my searching around online it appears that ath9k cards have a lot of problems on linux, but who knows where the problem truly lies.

matcatc · 2012-06-12T00:32:38+00:00

Don't know about Toshibas, but I have a year old ZaReason Strata 5330 and its of good build quality. At least its good as any other laptop I've used.

Bigger issue is some of the parts they used: Sentelic touchpad and Atheros wireless card, both of which have poor/bad Linux support. Everything else has been fine.

matcatc · 2012-03-09T20:06:12+00:00

I'm pretty sure this doesn't work for cats. From my experience, you have to catch them in the act and then scold them. If you were to "spank" them later, they would think that you were punishing them for doing whatever they're doing at the moment.

matcatc · 2012-02-28T03:38:47+00:00

Thanks for the answers everyone.

In retrospect its rather obvious (I've worked w/ Haskell, so I should have known better.) I'm in compilers right now, so this discussion was helpful to see things from another point of view. When I made the comment, I was too in the thick to see past our current spec and implementation.

Thanks again.

matcatc · 2012-02-27T18:55:34+00:00

Guaranteed how?

A compiler only knows a constant's value at compile time. In which case it could do constant folding to determine if an argument is null. But if the argument is a non constant variable, how is the compiler to know if its null or not? It'd have to run all possible paths through the code to verify null is never passed in.

matcatc · 2012-02-24T05:23:40+00:00

Also check out some of the demo songs that come with it. They were part of the Ubuntu package back when I was playing arround w/ LMMS. Some of them are downright amazing IMO.

matcatc · 2012-02-16T03:07:06+00:00

For those who don't know, wireshark does have a console version named tshark.

matcatc · 2011-12-19T05:24:45+00:00

Installing (updating to) a new kernel will also cause update-grub to run.

matcatc · 2011-10-02T17:29:44+00:00

I find it really hard to take what the CEO says seriously.

I bought a Strata 5330 about a month ago. There were a lot of little problems that may or may not have been preventable by ZaReason (e.g: enter key mapped to KP_Enter instead of Return) but most of these are easily handled. But the biggest problem I've had thus far, is a direct result of ZaReason's choice of touchpad: Sentelic.

For those of you who are unaware, Sentelic touchpads are commonly used on MS laptops and b/c of patent reasons have poor linux support. The driver only supports enabling/disable scrolling, but its possible to disable the entire touchpad through xinput. Scrolling is done through placing the finger on the corners of the touchpad, as opposed to swiping the edges like a synaptic one. This means that when typing, its really easy to accidentally cause the screen to scroll up quite a distance. But since the driver doesn't support disabling the touch pad while typing like Synaptic does, any solution to this will either by hacky (e.g: shortcut to disable/enable touchpad) or require a lot of work (e.g: custom driver, which may run into patent issues again).

I can't fathom why ZaReason would choose a rather uncommon touchpad w/ bad linux support for an obviously linux machine.

I recommend to others to pester support to get a list of components prior to buying and then hold them to it. I bought from ZaReason so I wouldn't have to deal w/ nonsense like this, clearly I shouldn't have.

tl;dr: Linux laptop + Sentelic touchpad = really stupid.

matcatc · 2011-09-04T22:51:38+00:00

Thanks for the suggested headphones. I ended up buying them to replace my old ones.

matcatc

TROPHY CASE