Favorite tools

Text editors

I mainly use two editors, the first one Emacs aka The One Editor has support for almost everything I want while programming, debugger, autocompletion, syntax checking, version control, and more. Most of its configuration is done through a lisp variant. The second one is Vim which I mostly use for configurations files and quickly reviewing a file as it's much lighter than Emacs though it's said to be as powerful as long as you install the good plugins.

www.gnu.org/software/emacs www.vim.org

Graphical terminal emulator

I use MLTerm as my graphical terminal emulator. It's a light multilingual terminal emulator written from scratch for X11. It has support for various character sets and encodings in the world and complex characters such as double width for East Asian, bi-direction for Arabic and Hebrew, and so on. It also supports anti-alias using FreeType, fake transparency with a background image, scrollbar, daemon mode and more. It also seems to be a bit faster than XTerm.

mlterm.sourceforge.net

Shell

My preferred shell is zsh, it's a shell designed for interactive use and it performs his goal much better than bash. Many of the useful features of bash, ksh and tcsh are incorporated into zsh. It also has support for complex glob patterns, command line editor with emacs or vi flavor, complex alias, an extensive autocompletion, and so on. It's also a scripting language in fact there are even IRC client, HTTP daemons and more written purely in zsh.

Window manager

I use Awesome WM as my only window manager. It's highly configurable and extensible. While primarly targeted at power users, developers, it also fits well for a multimedia environnement and more traditional tasks. It has a strong support for multihead with per screen desktops, windows tiling. No mouse is needed as everything can be performed with keyboard. It supports many Freedesktop standards. Configuration is done with the lua programming language. It was also one of the first window manager using asynchronous XCB library instead of the old synchronous Xlib which make it less subject to latency than many window managers. I also use slim as my login manager. It's almost as simple as xdm, has support for themes and consolekit.

awesome.naquadah.org slim.berlios.de

Image editor

I use the GIMP for image manipulation and especially for photos along with many plugins and G'MIC.

www.gimp.org gmic.sourceforge.net

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