The command line rocks. Point. But one can always improve one’s experience, and here are two recommendations from my desk:
- The developer of ack has chosen the domain betterthangrep.com for a reason. Just see the testimonials on their site, install it and enjoy it!
- I know that many people use the Z Shell today, but my default shell is the Friendly Interactive Shell. Its language might be suboptimal for scripting, but it features really nice command completion out of the box and has friendly coloring and extensive documentation through the “help” command. The only uncomfortable thing for me is the syntax for variable setting (“set -x DISPLAY :0; kwrite” instead of “DISPLAY=:0 kwrite”). Note that I did not have the time yet to dive into zsh, so it might be an even better fit, but fish is also good.
Ville said,
June 26, 2009 @ 9:44 pm
One more recommendation: “Terminator”, the tiling terminal emulator. Really eases the window overload without needing to switch to a tiling window manager.
majewsky said,
June 26, 2009 @ 11:22 pm
Terminator seems to look like the tiling that Konsole supports since years (Ctrl+Shift+L/T/S), or do I miss something?
vivainio said,
June 27, 2009 @ 8:54 pm
Seems like I missed the memo.
It seems konsole is broken on Karmic now, so I can’t get the tiling working in any useful sense. Should you be able to tile windows in arbitrary fashion like in Terminator (e.g. one horizontal split + 3 vertical splits), or are all of the tiles really either horizontal or vertical?
majewsky said,
June 27, 2009 @ 11:35 pm
*omfg* You’re right. The tiles are distributed either horizontally or vertically. When I wrote my previous comment, I assumed this functionality to be the same as in Konqueror, where the complex tiling is possible.
Aneurin Price said,
June 27, 2009 @ 1:15 am
In general, software sucks so badly that the most complimentary description I’m ever likely to give is “mediocre”. That said, there are three applications I’d describe as “fair to middlin’” – and they’re all command-line or TUI apps:
1) Screen
2) Vim
3) Git
(Honourable mention: aptitude – it’s not too bad)
Git is obviously fairly specific, and I guess I could live without it, and perhaps I could learn to use another editor, but I think I’d rather lose a limb than have to live the rest of my life without screen. It makes some of the pain a little more bearable.