Kategorie: Linux

Stopped using ratpoison and tried something new: xmonad.

Xmonad is a tiling window manager for the X window system. Tiling means, the application windows are ordered on the display in a way that they don’t overlap. So you get the most out of your display screen estate. There exist different layouts for tiling, including a full-screen-mode, where every application just uses the whole screen. Therefore xmonad has more modes than ratpoison. And like ratpoison xmonad is fully controllable via keyboard. So the perfect companion if you have to code most of the time.

This is more or less a followup to my last blog entry. Still trying to find out about which application is using my hard drive. I experimented some more with strace and learned something about vim search patterns. :)

Suppose you make a strace of a process (e.g. vim --help which outputs the standard vim commandline help) using the following command

strace -f -s 4095 vim --help 2>$HOME/tracefile.txt

This creates a very large file with all system calls the process did during it’s execution. To now find the file accesses in this tracefile you maybe would open this file in vim and then would naïvly search e.g. for the string ] open ( to see, which files where opened. Vim search hightlighting would show you all open statements, but you would have to read the file yourself to find the corresponding close statement. Works, but gets very strenously if there are a lot of open-calls.

Ever wondered which application right now is writing to the hard drive. Currenlty trying to minimize the hard drive usage on my laptop and tried to answer this exact question.

Unfortunately I did not find a tool to exactly tell me which application is currently writing to which file on the harddrive. But a least with the tool iotop I was able to find out, which application is writing to the hard disc at all. Under ubunto or debian install this simply by invoking

Da haben die Debian-Paketverwalter mal richtig aufgeräumt bei der vim7-Installation. Neben der Änderung von gestern, die ich offensichtlich auch umgehen hätte können, indem ich das Paket vim-full installiert hätte, welches den Default nano wieder überschreibt, ist vim nun auf der Kommando-Zeile so konfiguriert, dass bei Start von vim als vi ein zu vi kompatibles vim gestartet wird.

Dies wird dadurch bewerkstelligt, dass vim beim Aufruf als vi auch die virc-Dateien zusätzlich liest. Bei Debian existiert nun per Default eine Datei /etc/vim/virc mit dem folgenden Inhalt:

It seems the debian community prefers nano to vim. With the newest unstable debian installed if you do for example cvs commit you get the nano-Editor to edit your commit-message instead of vi. This happens allthough $EDITOR and $CVSEDITOR are not set.

If you don’t like nano and want your beloved vi back again do the following as root:

$ update-alternatives --config editor

Answer the following question with your preferred editor.