in which an interview is posted

piyo – 2012-01-29T01:44:58Z

Insightful interview, thanks for sharing.

I am also into reducing mouse usage, but most of my tweaking goes to my Windows work environment. (If you ever have to use that, then look to AutoHotKey-L and Launchy).

I just recently learned that pressing Alt-F1 and Alt-F2 in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Gnome pulls down the menu and runs a launcher, so I will be looking at your suggestions for inspiration.

I would be interested in reading a brief overview about Nix from you. I gave it a go on Lucid Lynx but I gave up after successfully installing a minor package (zsync). Do you have your own list of package install "recipes" enabled by Nix? Or are your recipes shared with Nixpkgs?

Phil – 2012-01-30T23:37:28Z

Definitely planning on posting more about Nix soon! I am using it for
Mozilla, Emacs, tmux, ocaml, OpenJDK 7, and Leiningen so far.

zhando – 2012-02-01T18:43:22Z

Thumbs up on xmonad/dmenu

Now dump debian/squeeze for arch..

Ooops.. NixOS seems to be way cooler.. Learn something every day..

aerique – 2012-02-11T07:40:55Z

Wow, it's like reading an interview with my twin brother! Except he would be the one acing all the classes and I would be the lazy bum :-|. (And my preferences go to Common Lisp and StumpWM.)

I'll definitely check out your Emacs enhancements. It's due time for me to take a good look at how I use Emacs and see what can be improved.

My main question: how exactly do you use the 'good' parts of GNOME with XMonad? I actually have no experience with it and have avoided GNOME like the plague during my Linux life.

Phil – 2012-02-14T18:18:27Z

aerique: Slime's refusal to make stable releases and insistence that everyone use CVS basically rules out CL for me even though I used Stump a few years ago. The fact that XMonad's code base is a mere 1200 LOC is a big draw too; Stump feels unwieldy in comparison.

For GNOME I launch all the background daemons in ~/.xsession:

gnome-settings-daemon &
gnome-power-manager &
gnome-screensaver & # for the lock-screen
gnome-panel & # for the wifi control
nm-applet &

I have the panel set to be invisible most of the time, but I can toggle it with a shell script I have bound to C-S-l for when I need access to the wifi applet. Sometimes I'll fire up Nautilus for peeking at photos on a USB drive, but that's "GNOME: the good parts" as far as I'm concerned.

aerique – 2012-02-19T10:17:00Z

I can understand your point about Slime and CVS, however most of the open source CL world has moved to Quicklisp (http://www.quicklisp.org/) these days and so has Slime. If CL has been on your radar in the past I'd definitely suggest you try it out if you haven't already.

Thanks for the GNOME information.

Michel S. – 2012-02-22T11:57:39Z

I saw your posts on the NixOS mailing list, and was curious if you use NixOS itself (or as it turns out, Nix package manager on top of another Linux distribution).

I've been looking at NixOS with interest for a while -- having an interest in functional programming languages (including Clojure), it just makes sense to build system packages in a functional way too.

Phil – 2012-02-27T06:13:55Z

Michel: I'm just using Nix on Debian Stable because Debian already does a really good job at keeping all the system-level stuff stable. The only drawback of course is that the packages are really old, which is why Nix is a perfect complement.