Comment by aphyr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aphyr | Hacker News Reader

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http://aphyr.com/media/desktop.jpg

Vim, vim, vim, vim, vim, vim, vim, vim, vim, logging, bacon, irb. I try to keep large methods I'm actively editing on the big windows and reference material on the smaller ones. I also arrange them physically to match the control flow--the deepest methods in the stack live to the left, and successively higher ones live to the right, up to the controller and view for MVC. I usually have an IRB session open to test new ideas, one window for running the test suite, and one to watch the logfile or run the server.

On the other monitor, usually docs, whatever I'm building, and more docs. On a single 24" display (at work), I usually fold the docs over my bacon/irb terminals. I run 6 workspaces in Openbox. Almost everything has a hotkey.

[edit]

Folks at my office know me as "that guy with all the terminals". I think part of it is that my working memory is not fantastic, and that I'm a really visual thinker. Having everything laid out in space really helps me keep track of a complex, modular system.

That's interesting. Your workflow reminds me of that Code Bubbles IDE posted a little while back:

http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/acb/codebubbles_site.htm

I spy Summer Glau on your wall :)

She needs to learn some trigger discipline.

Is that keyboard drawer comfortable to use? (it doesn't look so)

The desk sucked, but it was college furniture. My new desk is a little better. :)

It looks like you're checking out the Vim Color Scheme preview page. :)

http://code.google.com/p/vimcolorschemetest/

When I find myself with many vim instances running I tend to start giving them different color schemes to make them easier to differentiate. More often, though, I have things split across 8 virtual desktops.

(Same for shell windows. Too often I've forgotten where I was. Having, say, the shell to a remote server use a yellow background alerts me that this is not my local box.)

Also: Bacon rules.

Haha, no, that's the default scheme with slightly tweaked console colors. The difference is in content--some of them are mostly comments, others are HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Ruby.

Good find on the color scheme page though; I'm gonna have to play around a little with those!

Got a link for bacon? I haven't come across that in the context of programming tools (except insofar as tasty fried pig products are generally beneficial to programmer productivity).

http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/137928

It's just a really small rspec clone. Compact, expressive, gets the job done.

Wow, that's a lot of screen. And here I am doing most of my coding with a 9" netbook.

(Edit: Actually, I think it's the same as cool-RR's post elsewhere on this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1649828, just without the external monitor.)

I'm currently up to 3 x 24" monitors, and am doing my level best to talk myself out of a fourth. The luxury is nice, when you can waste screen real estate without a care, but it's as addictive as heroin.

I'm not advocating you stick with a 9" screen, but be careful with the lure of adding monitors!

You manage to type on that massive keyboard in a drawer? Surely not.

The keyboard isn't actually all that large. Those are 30 inch monitors. Total horizontal screen space is 4.25 feet.

The drawer was surprisingly comfortable as a wrist rest, too--but I tended to alternate between in the drawer and on the desk, depending on how much paper I was working with.

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