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Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

I develop on an Arch Linux box, two 22" monitors, XMonad, vim, and an IBM Model M.

But then I got a MacBook Pro, and I've actually been doing all development on it for the last few weeks. Textmate is the only non-vim editor I'd ever use.

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Have you tried Emacs in viper mode? To me vim shortcuts plus Emacs extensibility is the best of both worlds.

XMonad looks great, I look forward to trying this out.

I haven't. I enjoy modal editing, so I've never been able to get into emacs.

XMonad is really awesome. I use xmobar to give me a little bar at the top, it looks like this: http://haskell.org/sitewiki/images/a/ae/Arossato-config.png

To clarify, viper for Emacs includes most of vi's modes, so the editing experience can be very vi-like. [1] What happens is you tune the environment on a scale from vi to Emacs, with the one extreme being almost identical to vi and the other keeping its core key bindings but freeing up the ones needed to fully take advantage of Emacs Lisp, which is arguably more powerful than vimscript.

Yes, thanks for the XMonad intro, I really can't wait to try it.

P.S. I think we have some friends in common and may cross paths at the l2l. :)

[1] As johnswamps points out in the neighboring comment, to get vim features (not just vi) you may need vimpulse as well.

> To clarify, viper for Emacs includes most of vi's modes,

Ah, nice.

> P.S. I think we have some friends in common and may cross paths at the l2l. :)

I'm there right now, actually. :)

This is what I do. If you don't already, use vimpulse with viper mode (adds support for some vim features, not just vi)

Common Dev environment: * XMonad * Vim (Recently been trying out EMacs with Viper and Vimpulse) * Too many commandline utils to count * ack * sed * awk * Git, or Hg (pretty agnostic both do what I need and I work with projects using both.)

Mac: ITerm for the terminal everything else same as above.

Linux: XMonad for window manager, urxvt for the terminal

Windows: Avoid like the plague for development but I keep a VM or two around for testing.

Thanks for suggesting ITerm. I really don't like Terminal.app, so I'm going to check it out.

I find it superior but I've also known people who tried it and preferred Terminal.app. Hope it's useful.

just do try mrxvt for the terminal. it is even faster, even more configurable and has true tabs (unlike urxvt with its perl bindings)

I really feel it is the best of the breed of lightweight terminals - unfortunately development has slowed, so it doesnt have full unicode support.

Have you tried MacVim?

Nope. Well, I just did, since you commented on this.

I'm being totally irrational, but when I use a Mac, I really want everything to look and feel like a Mac app. Yeah, I'm a shameless Apple fanboy... but I've been using MacOS my entire life, I dunno, vim on Mac just feels wrong, for some reason.

Macs are Unix machines, ya know.

I use a mac for all my development, but I do it inside Terminal with GNU Screen and vim. I use MacVim for those rare instances when I want an Aqua-friendly text editor.

Yeah, see, I just can't stand Terminal.app. I can't really articulate why.

The lack of support for the Home and End keys drove me nuts.

Try iTerm - http://iterm.sourceforge.net/

Thanks, just saw it in another thread, and it's now stuck in my Dock.

Ctrl+e and ctrl+a work like home and end in Terminal.app.

Also, if you haven't already tried tmux, it's worth looking at. I find it fits my way of working much, much better than screen. It has both horizontal and vertical splits and more intuitive "tabs."

bad defaults = bad design, home and end should be the only keys that you need to work like home and end...

It uses emacs bindings. A lot of OS X does, they're actually really useful once you get familiar with them. I've also mapped caps lock to ctrl to make it easier on the pinky finger.

>Ctrl+e and ctrl+a work like home and end in Terminal.app.

I remapped Caps Lock to Ctrl for just this purpose, though I use iTerm. These shortcuts work system wide as well.

Visor is pretty cool, just recently started using it:

http://visor.binaryage.com/

Sounds similar to my setup: Arch Linux, dwm, vim, urxvt, tmux.

Yeah, tmux is sweet. I just use screen, but still.

It was especially awesome because this whole development stack is so lightweight, I install the same stuff on my beefy desktop and an old hand-me down PIII laptop, and it all works just as well.

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