I’m using finch at the moment, as I’m not a big fan of irssi nor weechat (I’m using weechat atm). You can tune finch bindings (mine acts the more vim-ish way I could set)

Learn vim and/or emacs. Those are really powerful tools.

Ratpoison is the last stop. I’ve been using it since 1.3, and it’s the first app I install on every linux I touch. rp shortcuts are screen-inspired, so you won’t have much trouble learning it.

Have fun!

Just tried mpd with mpc, it works great! Removed plait and replaced those maps with this one’s commands.

But I got some more queries about Ratpoison, I’ll google them out first, and if they still aren’t clear, I’ll ask you, if you don’t mind.

And I could use some tips on customizing the shell, too. I wish you wrote more articles if you had the time, it’d be awesome really!

You need a client as well to use mpd. mpc, and the ncurses version ncmpc.

Shell scripting syntax puts me off as well. But I wasn’t referring to those as much as I was to scripts in Python.

If you want a full Desktop environment, you know the deal. KDE4 looks great, and I never liked Gnome anyway.

_But_ if you want just a window manager, without the frills, get ratpoison. Fluxbox works well too, I suppose, but ratpoison really gets rid of the mouse. And it hardly uses any memory.

Last of all, customize your shell. It’s like the entrance rite to CLI geekdom.

Whoa, no, I haven’t tried out mpd, wonder why none of the lists I’ve seen online had that one. Am gonna try it now, it looks pretty neat!

Thanks, I’ll check out bitlbee, I was thinking of using Finch for the chat networks. I’ll explore this too, and stick to the one which suits.

Haven’t learned much of shell scripting, it always puts me off, the syntax. But yeah I am trying out ImageMagick’s tools right now, and had used them before for the python challenge too, they are helpful!

GNOME’s too much trouble, it hangs a lot for me, especially Firefox. I don’t know if its a hardware or a software fault (Memtest gave 100% results, this confuses me) since ALT+SysReq+REISUB works only one time in 3-4 hangs, random I meant. I just wanna get rid of GNOME, for this sake, or is it not its fault and is Firefox’s? It never hangs when I’m on KDE 3.5.

And thanks for the comment!

- Are you using the console vim, or the gui’d gVim?

- For console msuic, have you tried mpd/mpc/ncmpc?

- irssi is awesome, wait till you check out bitlbee, which can patch irssi into all your chat networks.

Other tools you should learn to use are ImageMagick’s set of image tools, wget, and of course writing your own scripts to get things done. Once you’re there, you can move yourself to ratpoison and toss the mouse.