Working Environment

I've been thinking a lot lately about how I work. You know the saying: work smarter, not harder. I'm wondering if I am working smart enough.

First off, I was a Unix/Linux systems administrator for 10 years, so my preferred development OS is linux (Ubuntu, primarily). I do ruby on rails development. That means I normally have two windows open: A terminator window, and a browser window (usually flock).

I am a bit of a command line/terminal bigot. I work most efficiently that way. I know lots of people do great work with various graphical IDE's. I've just never been satisfied that I (me personally) can work faster than on the command line. I use vim extensively. With multiple windows open in terminator, each of which is running a named screen session, I am able to have a couple of edit sessions and a console or database session running. With a little hackery, I can copy text to and from the various windows using keyboard shortcuts only.

Why flock browser? Well, for starters, I was part of the development team for a while, and still in contact with those working on it. If something breaks, I know who to talk to about it. Also, I find the aggrigation of my various social networking bits useful (but the addition of linkedin would be nice).

In addition to these, I have, for one of my projects, the need to use campfire. To help with that, since the mozilla update of the number of unread messages is not always reliable, I use butane to keep up with the discussion. Finally, I use Pidgin for general IM functions.

If anyone reading this has any suggestions for working smarter, I'd be happy to entertain them.