51–60 of 128 posts
Mavis beacon teaches typing.. Seriously?
He sounded pretty serious to me. Do you have a better suggestion? The Mavis Beacon software does a perfectly fine job at teaching touch-typing.
Without starting a religious war, it's essential to learn the basics of vi for it is ubiquitous on all UNIX variants. Even if you use emacs, it's essential knowledge.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'd be surprised how many senior-level people are hunt and peck typers. I've met several software engineers with 10+ years of experience who don't type with all 10 fingers (assuming they have that many).
Yes. Actually, I don't understand why people emphasize on touch typing here. Engineering is not a data entry job.
Now, does doubling your typing speed also double your productivity? No, of course not, you spend time thinking, looking through code, reading specs, searching for solutions, compiling, etc. But I don't see how improving your typing speed would not result in at least some productivity gains.
Without starting a religious war, it's essential to learn the basics of vi for it is ubiquitous on all UNIX variants. Even if you use emacs, it's essential knowledge.
If you are a vim power user, finding yourself using traditional BSD vi is likely to be an unpleasant experience, making the vim is great because vi is installed everywhere weak as an argument.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? vi isn't even the default editor on many Linux distributions anymore.
It is on Debian and CentOS server installs and is available on a Ubuntu default install. It's the common denominator. Why frig around with emacs, pico, nano etc when vi is always there and is the same?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? vi isn't even the default editor on many Linux distributions anymore.
I'm serious, not trying to be an ass here: Is emacs? It seems to me that both religions are not 'standard' anymore. I tend to see pico, nano, joe etc. - occasionally vi (but not vim).
Mavis beacon teaches typing.. Seriously?
Well, I guess there's no memetically famous touch-typing tutorials software for Linux or Mac. In fact, the only other memetically famous touch-typing software I know of is Typing Of The Dead¹, and that's not exactly widely-available. ¹: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Typing_of_the_Dead
The key to learning how to touch type is just typing _a lot_. You might not be very fast (I'm not), but you can at least get your eyes off your keyboard and use more than one finger per hand.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'd be surprised how many senior-level people are hunt and peck typers. I've met several software engineers with 10+ years of experience who don't type with all 10 fingers (assuming they have that many).
Yes. Actually, I don't understand why people emphasize on touch typing here. Engineering is not a data entry job.
Without starting a religious war, it's essential to learn the basics of vi for it is ubiquitous on all UNIX variants. Even if you use emacs, it's essential knowledge.
While this argument might have held weight once, I think these factors undermine it: Emacs used to be considered 'expensive' in terms of disk/memory. These days, it really isn't. Non-Linux unixes are less and less of a factor these days, and even most of those have some sort of packaging system where installing emacs is a quick operation, rather than a laborious download/compile/install. Emacs itself has remote editi…
However, it's more likely that you will have some version of Vi. The one I'm thinking of is the Busybox version.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? vi and its derivates has their own (weird) usage-convention which you will find in no other software anywhere on the planet. Learning them gives you very few transferable skills. Any "Unixy" thing you have around these days will have more resources than most computes did in the mid 90s, and the need for a "lightweight" editor like vi is much, much smaller now than it was back then. Even my Buffalo router has nan…
"Why? vi and its derivates has their own (weird) usage-convention which you will find in no other software anywhere on the planet. Learning them gives you very few transferable skills." Arrgghhh! man readline, and search (/) for inputrc. ANY app that uses readline can be set to use vi OR emacs keystrokes and history, by setting an entry in .inputrc. If you use either editor regularly this will set your command line s…
Other cute things I have discovered lately: You can actually click in ncurses dialogs running in your terminal, even over SSH, if you run a proper terminal. Coming from a PuTTYish background, that is definitely not obvious ;)