Well, at some point over the next couple of days I’m going to try to find time to write a tutorial on writing LaTeX documents. Watch this space…

Skippy recently picked up on a months-old post by Dan regarding useful bits of software, so I thought I’d chip it with my own tuppence-worth.

Editor: Vim. While I appreciate that some people prefer Emacs (and they’ll be first against the wall when the revolution comes), I find Vim (or any VI) much easier on the hands. Vim adds syntax highlighting and many useful plugins to basic VI.

For more in-depth note-taking: Vim again (I’ve been meaning to learn about the Vim-Outliner thing too, looks like it could be handy).

For word-processing: Vim. And LaTeX.

For e-mail: Vim. No, mutt. But I write them in Vim.

To keep my various accounts in sync, I use darcs, which lets me branch and merge my home directories nicely, and replicate them across all the hosts I use. I keep system config files in darcs, too. And there’s a Vim plugin for running darcs commands.

On an unrelated note, Skippy mentions that to hide a Windows SMB share from casual browsing, prepend a ‘$’ to the name. Yet in Samba on Unixen, the corresponding option is something like ‘browseable = true/false’. I thought Unix was supposed to be obscure and obtuse, and Windows user-friendly and easily understandable?

And I’m not so sure what’s so great about mounting repositories as drive letters, since any decent OS would abstract away the concept of separate drives from the user unless the user actually went looking. But, I think I’ve had this argument before; I’d just like to point out the fantasticness of autofs+sshfs (cd /mnt/ssh/bma@bmalee.eu/public_html…).