/ English /

The tools I use

in my everyday work

Misc software

WorkRave — supports my work rhythm. Excellent stuff; works on many platforms.

WordNet — English lexical database, a thesaurus program.

Mozilla Firefox — the browser.

Linux

GNU Emacs with:

iswitch — for switching between buffers in many-file projects
nxml mode — for editing XML
CPerlMode — for editing Perl code
some tricks and extensions from EmacsWiki

MPlayer — for playing music and video files. Real high-quality open-source software.

CenterICQ, a simple text-mode ICQ client (with support for a number of other protocols). The best user interface of all those icq clients I’ve seen. Disadvantage: doesn’t support working in a Unicode environment (e.g. when LANG=ru_RU.UTF-8), but works through luit.

Also:

qvwm window manager. Light and simple, easy to use. Configurable.
~~zsh — z shell~~ — not anymore, because of the lack of Unicode support
vim — for quick edits
yudit — for Unicode files editing
xmlwf (distributed with Expat) — for checking XML well-formedness
konsole from KDE — as a shell terminal program

Shell aliases and functions

Basic:

alias le=less
alias l="ls -al"
alias gr="grep -r"

CVS, to see what has been changed and needs commiting:

alias c.status='cvs status 2>&1 | grep -E "Examining|Locally " | grep -B1 Locally'

Shell session management — saving and loading command history in a .history in the current directory in Zsh:

alias save='fc -n -A .history'
alias load='fc -R .history'

Same, but for bash:

alias save='history -a .history'
alias load='history -r .history; test -r .shell && . .shell'
export HISTFILESIZE=10000
export HISTSIZE=10000

Create a directory and change to it immediately. mkdir and cd combined:

function mcd () 
{
    mkdir $1
    cd $1
}

When on Windows

EditPadLite — for simple textfile edits

UnixTools — for find, grep and other good old unix tools

Advanced Disk Catalog — for tracking contents of the CDRs I’ve burned

When developing

…with Perl

Template-Toolkit — great template-based text-generation instrument. Very good.

Also:

strict — for sanity
Carp::Assert — for greater sanity
AppConfig — for config file reading
XML::LibXSLT — for XSLT transformations

while ( 1 ) { 
  …
  if ( … ) { last; }
}

constructs.

For web functional testing

FunkLoad — a Python-based web testing tool. A good one.

Services

Delicious social bookmarks.

RSS Fwd — watching RSS and ATOM feeds by email. A great service.

Flickr.com, storing and sharing photos.