Wednesday December 29, 2004 New Year's Resolutions
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Like a lot of other people, it's about this time of the year that I start thinking about my New Year's Resolution list. The usual ones are there; things like try to eat better and exercise regularly, but this year I've added an important other one. Let's see how long it takes for me to ignore or break it. |
Don't be afraid to try out new software to improve how you work: I'm one of these people that if they find something that works for them, are reticent to change. For instance, I'm a vi man. I've never felt the urge to swap to emacs (or xemacs) even though there are lots of other people that love it. Still, that's no excuse not to use vim, which is a much improved version of vi. I tried doing the swap for a week or so last year. Unfortunately it was at a time when I was very busy. Differences in the way that vi and vim work flummoxed me. For example, I'm so used to hitting "u" twice to see what my last edit was. In vim, "u" is a multi-level undo, and there is a multi-level redo - who's keybinding escapes me for the moment - to get you all the way back. This slight difference was screwing me up big time.
Recently I've been editing under Windows XP, as I've been trying to learn the ZRF scripting language for Zillions of Games and Notepad is so inadequate, that I decided to install the Windows version of vim. Oh man, what a difference. It's so nice to have an editor under Windows that my fingers are wired for. There is also a vim color syntax highlighting mode for ZRF files which I'm finding indispensible.
For my RealWork(TM), I know there are lots of other tools like this that can make my day to day life much simpler. Time to force myself to find them, learn them and use them.
( Dec 29 2004, 09:17:42 AM PST ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [1]
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Posted by robert prince on January 07, 2005 at 11:08 AM PST #