Stochastic Geometry

Okay, no. I gave it a try for a good week. And by the end of the week, I don’t have any way to change basic stuff like fonts or colours, completion is still a mystery, line numbers are buggy, and I’ve not yet seen one single function that made me say “y’know, it’s a pain, but it’s worth it”. I wound up getting not one extra page added to the RCMS project during the entire week because of emacs configuration hell. Frac that for a game of soldiers.

I’ll stick with vim 7. Completion? Got it. Reformatting code? Got it. Testing code syntax in the editor? Got it.

And now, on with the actual work. Y’know, the thing we’re meant to use the editor for in the first place?… Read the rest

Hmmm. I started programming on an old ICL OPD (anyone else remember microdrives?). There was some fooling about afterwards with an IBM PS/2 system (woo-hoo, 40Mb of hard disk space!), but the first time I hit what I thought of as a real machine was on a unix account in the first week of college. And that’s when I first hit the biggest question any starting computer engineer hits (or used to hit, back then): Vi or Emacs.

Back then, I chose Vi by default, in that it was the first thing I came across and command/edit mode switching actually made sense to me. And I used vi for a good while afterwards, until I finally found, and immediately switched to, vim. I’ve used vim ever since for any task where I could use it on any platform where I could get it (in fact, not being able to use it for wordpress blogging ticks me off).… Read the rest