A question for developers

[Chad Perrin]

On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 05:21:44PM +0800, Erich Dollansky wrote:
> 
> I use joe, gedit, kate and bluefish.
> 
> All have their week points.
> 
> One advantage of using several in parallel is that you can 
> configure each to a special need of you and then start the one 
> which seems to fit best your current task.

I find that I get the same benefit by creating multiple configuration
files for a single application, and starting it with the configuration I
want for the specific task at hand, if that single application with
different configurations is better suited to the task at hand than some
other application.  For instance, I might have a .vim_ruby_rc and a
.vim_english_rc, one for programming in Ruby and one for writing articles
in English.

If I want to have quick, easy startup for each, I might use aliases such
as:

    alias evim 'vim -S .evimrc'
    alias rvim 'vim -S .rvimrc'

If I want a quick way to remind myself what Vim configurations I have
available, I might use an alias like this:

    alias vimlist 'alias|grep vim'

I would do this sort of thing because of the unignorable boost to my
productivity that I have observed when using Vim, as opposed to other
editors.  I don't want to give that up for some varying configuration
options, using something like nano instead.  If, however, you find that a
different editor actually suits your needs better for a different
purpose, by all means use it for that purpose.  I just didn't want to
leave these comments without ensuring that it's clear to anyone who
doesn't already know it that it's easy to use different configurations
for the same editor when using it for different purposes.

I do something similar with my mail user agent, and email downloading and
sending tools, so that I can work with multiple email addresses without
having to use email clients I don't like.

> 
> joe has also the advantage that it behaves differently depending 
> under which name your start it.

What do you mean by "which name"?  I'm curious.

-- 
Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]
O'Rourke's Circumcision Precept: You can take 10 percent off the top of
anything.
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