Up to Main Index Up to Journal for June, 2013 JOURNAL FOR WEDNESDAY 26TH JUNE, 2013 ______________________________________________________________________________ SUBJECT: Monitoring failure :( DATE: Wed 26 Jun 23:07:18 BST 2013 Today my main monitor failed ... 22" 1680x1200 16:9 DVI. Nice size as I usually have a terminal open running vim - with a vertical split and two files open side by side - in the main area with additional terminals open down the right hand side. Then there is a secondary monitor to the left which usually has a browser running full screen on one desktop and 3-4 VMs running on other desktops. Quite a busy machine. Now my secondary monitor is currently my main monitor ... 19" 1280x1024 4:3 DVI. This has been crippling as the whole screen has as much real estate as vim normally takes up - leaving no room for the terminals down the right hand side unless I want to really squish things up. Current my secondary monitor - I usually run dual monitors - is a spare 17" 1280x1024 4:3 VGA analogue. As I run dwm[1] as my window manager flitting around the open windows, desktops and between screens using just the keyboard is very fast - and confusing for people watching :) When working on WolfMUD I usually have vim in the main area editing code and stacked to the right of that a terminal for compiling/running the server and one or two terminals running telnet. Now with less screen real estate I have vim open on one desktop and the server and telnet sessions on another desktop. When a compile fails I now have to keep flipping backwards and forwards to check error messages, check source code, edit, flip back to compile again, flip again to vim - Aargh! it's driving me nuts :( The alternative is to not split vim and only view one file at a time - I hardly use the horizontal split as my code usually fits a width of 80 columns and it's a waste of space ... It's amazing how something a simple as changing a monitor can kill your productivity. If I'm sitting in front of a monitor for 12-14 hours a day I want it to be a descent one dammit! I don't like change either. Oh, and the latest Firefox 22 update today broke the pentadactyl[2] addon. So I'm glad I use Firefox mainly for testing web stuff and xombrero[3] as my main browser - because it's keyboard driven and fast. Before you ask - I find Chrome to be a pain in the arse. I've tried it, I've tried to like it, really I have. I've even tried making myself use it inplace of Firefox for a day - but no dice. The main problem is I don't turn JavaScript on by default. Without it most plugins do not work as they are written with HTML, CSS and JavaScript! Let me turn off JavaScript execution on the page and from 3rd parties but let me run local JavaScript and I'd be happy. Or let me remap the keyboard to vim like bindings - yes there are plugins to do this but they are written using ... JavaScript ... *sigh* I don't like grabbing the rodent just to browse, it's simply not quick enough once you start using 'f' to follow links using link hinting - especially if you are testing and know to follow link 5, 52, 7 then 9 over and over for some particular test. So after a lot of reconfiguring, tweaking and grumbling I've little time left for a WolfMUD Wednesday session so I'm going to postpone it till tomorrow evening now :( -- Diddymus [1] https://dwm.suckless.org/ Love the domain name :) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentadactyl [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xombrero Up to Main Index Up to Journal for June, 2013