Re:The perfect mouseless FreeBSD desktop
by jrockway on Thursday February 05, 2009 @08:05PM
(#469119)
I have a similar setup. Xmonad as the window manager, conkeror for the web browser (why would an emacs user use vimperator?), and emacs for everything else. (I also use rxvt-unicode, since it is scriptable in Perl and handles Unicode correctly.)
Some other things I use:
* bitlbee for non-IRC chat networks. I keep irssi running under screen on my remote server, and this means I am always on IRC and AIM (which I use instead of email, mostly). I get IRC/AIM/Jabber in emacs via ERC and irssi-proxy from the remote server.
* xmms2. It manages my music library like Amarok or iTunes does, but is very easy to control from external scripts. Back when I used amarok, I would always have to switch from emacs to my amarok desktop to change to a song by name. Now, with the help of a small perl script, I can hit C-c a a in emacs to change to any song I want. It's great.
The only major issue I have being mouseless is that there is always the occasional website that doesn't work right in Conkeror (hello, Stack Overflow), and I haven't found a good PDF reader yet. #xmonad didn't have much to say, so I use emacs for now. It is definitely non-optimal, though.
Anyway, I agree with the sentiment expressed in this article. Pretty desktops are nearly worthless for productivity. They may help inexperienced users achieve some minimal productivity, but once you are comfortable using your computer, they really get in the way.
Some other things I use:
* bitlbee for non-IRC chat networks. I keep irssi running under screen on my remote server, and this means I am always on IRC and AIM (which I use instead of email, mostly). I get IRC/AIM/Jabber in emacs via ERC and irssi-proxy from the remote server.
* xmms2. It manages my music library like Amarok or iTunes does, but is very easy to control from external scripts. Back when I used amarok, I would always have to switch from emacs to my amarok desktop to change to a song by name. Now, with the help of a small perl script, I can hit C-c a a in emacs to change to any song I want. It's great.
The only major issue I have being mouseless is that there is always the occasional website that doesn't work right in Conkeror (hello, Stack Overflow), and I haven't found a good PDF reader yet. #xmonad didn't have much to say, so I use emacs for now. It is definitely non-optimal, though.
Anyway, I agree with the sentiment expressed in this article. Pretty desktops are nearly worthless for productivity. They may help inexperienced users achieve some minimal productivity, but once you are comfortable using your computer, they really get in the way.