The title mem spawned in my mind as a result of two things. First, I finally tried a tiling window manager, after many people recommending it to me throughout the last year or two (most recently in the comments to “My Linux Stack”, thanks Torben!). Secondly, I didn’t have too much time recently to play with my setup, having high school final exams and getting back to work, so I found 900mb of updates waiting for me in portage.
Now, 900mb is a lot. A few years ago I had a pretty complete and useful Slackware setup on my old computer weighing 900mb. I choosed packages by hand, I used some advice from the Saving Space HOWTO, made ruthless decisions about what software I need and what not. Now, I have 12gb filled up on the partition with Gentoo. I wonder how much of it is garbage. I decided I don’t want it this way anymore and I don’t want to spend that much time on keeping up to date with the software, upgrading packages, fiddling with this stuff etc.
A lot of knowledgeable people swear by Emacs. But when you first open it up you can get scared. Its hard to open a file without entering a mysterious key combination, there is no syntax-highlight, no file browser, no auto-indent… So what’s the reason? There are actually three of them I believe:
- Emacs is a editor-building framework, not an editor itself. If you want to use it, you need to customize it. Using a plain Emacs doesn’t make much sense.
- A lot of the nice stuff is in the CVS version. Eg. a lot of people is using stable versions of Emacs with some ugly X11 toolkit on Linux, where actually there is a much better version with GTK2, Xft and lots of other nice stuff, but you need to grab it from CVS.
- You need to get to know the various packages Emacs provides to explore it full power
Well, I was bored a bit today. As usual I started Firefox and I’ve tried to find something interesting on reddit, del.icio.us or digg… I found nothing, so I thought I would write something interesting myself to kill the boredom :) I’m now “the guy who wrote the interview with famous programmers” and I don’t even hope to beat the popularity of that post ever with anything, so I will just try to have some fun now.
One of the topics I like to write about is software. And as I have been using Linux exclusievely for about two years and for seven years in general I have been writing mostly about Linux or cross-platform essentials. I don’t want to repeat the topics one-by-one or translate my Polish posts, so I thought I would write just one post gathering the essence of my knowledge about Linux.
At some hot, boring afternoon I got an _Idea_. With the help of public accessible e-mail adresses I asked 10 questions to a bunch of programmers that I consider very interesting people and I respect them for variuos things they created. Coming out with question was a 5 minute job for me - these are things I would ask about if I could speak with them personally for, let’s say, 10 minutes, and I didn’t have time for thinking too much. The last two question don’t have anything to do with programming, this is simply something I like to know about everyone I talk to, lets say that’s my hobby. Not everyone wanted to answer them, and that’s fine. It was the first “interview” I ever made, so I also made some mistakes, which went out as people started answering… But despite of this, I learnt a lot of interesting stuff, so it was definietly a valuable experience.
