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Staying in a Terminal

Since starting with YouGov, I've had to get a little more serious about my shell usage. I've never been a huge commad line junky. It has never been something I avoided, but delving into intricate find, sed, awk and grep operations was never my forté. While I'm still far from guru status, I'm beginning to catch on. The big change for me has been using Emacs in the terminal. I could have used VNC or used a remote X session but it seemed like a better option to just get serious about my command line skills. Jamie is something of an inspiration when he starts vim-ing it up as well :)

It has been something of a challenge but now that I've started down the path of terminal enlightenment, I doubt there is a way to return to the world of GUIs. The best aspect of learning command line tools is that they not only help you to get a job done now, they can be helpful later in terms of small scripts or even applications. Once you take a little time to really understand the command line options and learn a few details, it is much easier retaining the information. Of course practice is also helpful!

Seeing as I like to keep my "work" environment the same, I've also switched over local development to a terminal session of Emacs. This was a bit harder to do since there are a few occasions where grabbing the mouse to explore some code can be helpful. That habit has been kicked pretty easily, although there are still times it would be nice.

Also, I finally got around to switching my caps-lock and control key. This has been very tough to get used to, but I think it is actually somewhat helpful. Before, I found that my pinky just sat on my control key the whole day. This put my hand in a somewhat awkward position, and eventually, my left hand started to hurt in a rather scary way. After a day or so of the switch, things started to get slightly easier. It takes a little more mental attention when typing, so I've paired my changes in keyboard mapping with pushing myself to become a better typist. Accuracy has always been my biggest issue when it comes to typing, so that has been the focus.

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