Training your Mutt
Mutt is a great mail client, in large part because it is extremely customizable. You can tweak Mutt’s behavior and have it do tricks that are nearly impossible to do with other mail clients — but it can be a bit daunting to get started with. Let’s take Mutt...
Vim tips: Working with external commands
Vim is a powerful editing tool, but there are some things it just can’t do. However, Vim lets you access shell commands and utilities without leaving Vim, and that lets you perform some amazing tricks. If you run :shell or just :sh while you’re in the editor, Vim (or...
Oh noes! The command line!
Just reading Mark Shuttleworth’s response to Matt Zimmerman’s summation of the community’s expectations of the Ubuntu Dapper Drake 6.06 LTS release. One thing stuck out about Zimmerman’s comments, that’s the complaint that users still have to use the command line for some tasks. I know, the Holy Grail for...
Vim tips: Using Vim mappings and abbreviations
Vim ships with a lot of useful functions that make life easier when you’re editing text, but Vim is also an extremely extensible editor. If you find yourself typing the same long commands or strings of text over and over again, it’s time you learned how to set mappings...
Vim tips: Folding fun
The problem with writing and editing on a computer, versus having words on paper, is that it’s usually hard to compare text from different sections of a document when they don’t fit on the screen together. One way to do it is to use Vim’s viewports feature. Another is...
Vim tips: Moving around using marks and jumps
Editing in Vim can be a breeze, if you know how to make use of its more advanced features. Moving around files can feel like a slog if you’re stuck with the basic movement keys, but editing is effortless when you have command of marks and jumps. Basically, a...
Vim tips: Using viewports
A lot of folks use Vim, but many exploit only a small percentage of the editor’s features. Sure, you might know how to do the basics in Vim, but what about using more advanced features such as folding, split windows, and marks? With a little practice, you can really...
First look at Vim 7
The final release of Vim 7 is just around the corner, and it brings a number of new features to the venerable editor, including spell checking, omni completion for several programming and markup languages, tab pages, undo branches, and several other features that are worth upgrading for. To test...
How to make money writing, the query letter (or email…)
Prior to taking the job I have now as editorial director for Linux.com, I was a freelancer for about six years, writing for Linux Magazine, Enterprise Linux Magazine, UnixReview.com, Linux Weekly News, IBM developerWorks, ZDNet, and a few others. I thought I’d share a few tips here that might...
Two years with WordPress
I started this blog in 2004, with WordPress 1.0. The domain is older than that, I ran Dissociated Press using a few other blogging tools, like phpWebLog, Slash, and (briefly) Blosxom, but WordPress is the only tool that I’ve been consistently happy with. (Which is not to say that...