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It's interesting how your choice of tools is influenced by
the environment you're working in. I worked at a university-based ISP
for years (CICNet) before I went to CNN: I used Pine for all my
email, some Emacs, some MS Word, etc. When I went to CNN, I started using a
new set of tools to manage my email and work life: Microsoft
Outlook had my calendar, address book, and all my email. Now that I'm
working back at a university, my choice of tools is moving back
towards what I used to use at CICNet: Pine and Emacs.
Part of this is based on a lack of resources. I'm currently using
a PII/266 laptop with 128mb of memory. Pine uses around 4mb of real
memory on average on my box; emacs around 6mb. Fire up Outlook, and
immediately 20mb of real memory is gone. (To be fair, the biggest
pig is Mozilla: I regularly have 40mb Mozilla process running around.)
GNU Screen I've also started using GNU
Screen, a tool I haven't used in five or six years. Screen
lets you keep multiple "virtual" sessions going over a single
telnet/SSH connection. These days you'd tend to just fire up another
xterm/SSH window, but Screen has one important benefit over that
approach: you can "detach" from a group a virtual screen sessions,
then re-attach later without losing any state. I typically have 3-4
virtual sessions running on screen on my home Linux box: a Pine
session for my non-work email; one session running Emacs, and another
misc shell session or two. I don't have X installed on my laptop, so
when I get to work, I start up a single SSH session back to my Linux
box, fire up Screen with all these sessions. When it's time to go
home, I can detach from these screen sessions all as a group, shutdown
my laptop and go home. At home I can fire up my laptop again, login
to my Linux box again, re-attach my screen session, and find my email,
emacs, and shell sessions right where I left them.
Even better, if I lose my connection to my Linux box, Screen will
keep my sessions intact, and I can re-attach to them when I get my
connection back. Compare that to your normal xterm/SSH Linux box
scenario: you lose your connection for any reason, and that job you
were running for the last N minutes is killed.
The only downside of Screen is that it traps Ctrl-A by default. I
can change it to something else, but if you're an Emacs user, anything
you pick is going to be used somewhere. (Screen can of course send a
Ctrl-a to your application, but training your fingers to remember to
use that isn't easy.
Pine
I've never completely got away from Pine; even when I
used Outlook at CNN, I would still use Pine from home: on a dial-up
connection, it was much faster to start Pine and point it at
the Exchange server than it was to start Outlook. (On a dial-up
connection, Outlook could take many minutes to fire up.)
But Pine has it's pleasures. The interface is moded, but easy to
use; you can do everything in Pine without taking your hand of the
keyboard.
The main downside to Pine is the lack of rich display for HTML
email. Pine can now grok HTML, and presents a readable view of HTML
email, but it's kind of like being stuck using a Gopher client in the
age of HTML and the web.
Emacs
I'm also back to my old friend, Emacs. Emacs was where I lived my
life when I worked at the CERT: I used MH-E to read my email, GNUs for
reading News, and I believe the CERT might have still been using
Scribe for text processing, which could be edited very nicely under
Emacs.
Using Emacs again was actually pushed by my almost complete
conversion to Mozilla. Radio Userland uses the very nice Microsoft
in-line HTML editor, but that tool only works if you're accessing
Radio from Internet Explorer. From Mozilla, you need to do straight
HTML. Movable Type, which I'm now using for
a work weblog, also wants to deal in straight HTML. And so Emacs
is back again as my HTML editor. I'd probably prefer a WYSIWYG
editor; at home I use Dreamweaver. I tried a couple of freeware
Windows HTML editors, but all of them ended up being inferior to
Emacs. I run Emacs locally under Windows 2000; compared to the other
Windows based tools, Emacs is nice and lightweight, and since I'm only
using simple HTML markup, Emacs benefits as a tool for slinging around
text come to the fore again. (Ah, the irony of Emacs now being
considered "lightweight!")
What sealed the deal for Emacs was get a spelling checker working
again. It took some messing around, and I ultimately have to run
Emacs from under Cygwin, but I've got ispell working again, so all's
right with the world.
11:15:33 AM 
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