3 Nov
2011
3 Nov
'11
9:19 a.m.
On 3 November 2011 04:28, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
On 11/02/2011 09:55 PM, Liam Proven wrote:
Fair point, but in support work, which is what I mainly do, you pretty
much have to use whatever tools are already there on your customers'
machines. You can't install your own all the time - partly for
licencing reasons, partly for time reasons, partly because on a
partly-screwed-up machine that might make things worse.
As such, I have always focussed on learning to make the best use of
the standard tools on various OSs that I support, rather than on
customising them to suit myself. It's no help if my /own/ box is /just
so/, just the way I like it - I earn my living setting up and fixing
other people's boxes.
Mind, for 15y I did carry around a small but slowly-growing library of
write-protected disks which contained a whole assortment of tools for
me to use - from Norton to anti-virus scanners to various handy little
extra tools.
Eventually it became a library of CDs, then a USB stick, and now, even
that is rarely used - I pull down what I think they need from the Web.
(Ninite.com is a wonderful time-saver in this regard.)
As for editors, when MS-DOS 5.0 came out, I was able to junk Edlin and
go to EDIT.EXE - and I really /really/ liked it. It is still one of my
very favourite text editors to this day. Never found a Linux editor
quite as good, although SETedit came very close - but it is no longer
maintained and doesn't run on modern distros. This makes me very sad.
--
Liam Proven ? Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419
AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508
I imagine EMACS Lisp is not much use outside of the context of using
and customising Emacs, for instance - is that fair? I don't use Emacs.
I've learned too many text editors and when I first met Emacs it was
part of an expensive OS of limited application; I mainly worked with
DOS and Macs, on which it was not available.
?There have been many Emacsen available for DOS since its very early days.
?Some free, some commercial, most very good. ?Just FYI.