in which an interview is posted

The folks over at The Setup just posted an interview with me wherein I rant about hardware, interactivity, and Emacs.

Note: this was written up over a month ago; if I were interviewed today I couldn't help but mention the Nix package manager. I use it on my Debian Squeeze system to complement apt-get; I get all the system-level stuff that has to be stable from Debian and anything that needs to be fresh from Nix.

« older | 2012-01-27T03:58:25Z

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.