Sanctioned Parts List II

Some while ago, Mark Pilgrim did a post on cool software tools he couldn’t do without. In the absence of any pending rants about religion, here’s mine. Probably only of interest to fellow geeks, so cut for length.
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Mail:

I’m still using Pine, that staple from university days. As it’s terminal based, I can use it to read my mail by logging in to my machine from wherever I happen to be. It supports multiple incoming folders for mailing lists and the like, and multiple roles. It’ll invoke an external editor, so I can use Vim to write email. The address book is nice. It keeps mail in flat text files, which, despite being a somewhat broken format, is easily understood by grep and the like. What more do you want? I hear good things about Mutt and also Apple’s own Mail.app, but nothing which compels me to change.

I run Exim as a mail transport agent, and use its nice filtering lanuage to handle sorting stuff into folders, ditching HTML mail sent to my Usenet posting address, and that kind of thing. Fetchmail gets the mail to Exim. Exim calls dccproc, which checks for bulkiness, and rbfilter, which checks for blacklisted senders.

My pobox.com forwarding address has been around since 1998 and so gets a tonne of spam, but since I used their spam filtering options to block China, Korea, and Brazil; and also turned on their cunning “looks like a consumer broadband machine” test (which looks for bytes from the IP address in the machine’s hostname, as that’s a common naming convention for broadband addresses), spam is a solved problem for me.

News:

I was using trn, but gave that up after failing to compile it for OS X. slrn is a worthy replacement, with colour highlighting and a useful scoring language. As well as using that to killfile people, I can increase the score of posters or threads which interest me and sort by score in the thread view. slrn shares trn’s handy habit of doing the right thing when you just keep hitting space, which is handy for eating and reading news at the same time.

I use Leafnode to fetch news from a variety of servers (NTL groups from their server, news.individual.net for everything else). A tip for Mac users: Leafnode creates directories full of lots and lots of small files (one per article, in fact). HFS+, the native OS X filesystem, is dog slow at accessing these. Make a UFS disk image and put your news spool on there.

Editing:

I use Vim, which combines the usability of the old Unix vi with the startup time of Emacs. It does all the usual good stuff like syntax highlighting every language known to man (including quoted text in mail messages, which is nice), indenting automatically and all that jazz. A killer feature is the function which will complete words from occurrences in the same file, or from a tags file (a list of all the names defined in a program). Helpful for not getting variable names wrong and also in rants where you find yourself writing “evangelical” a lot. The interface to cscope is also very useful when writing C code (and more importantly, trying to understand other people’s C code).

Browsing:

Since I started using OS X, I’ve been happily using Safari as my web browser. When writing long comments here on LiveJournal, I occasionally miss the text entry box editing facility of Mozex, since I could then edit the comments with Vim, but since no-one’s ported Mozex to the Mac yet, I’ve not switched to Mozilla or Firefox. You Windows users should so switch, of course, because Firefox is nicer and a lot more secure than IE.

Uploading:

I maintain my websites with sitecopy, which replaces that Perl or Python script which everyone seems to have written at least once to FTP stuff to their provider’s web space. sitecopy is works with both NTL’s and Gradwell’s servers and can do useful stuff like uploading based on hash values rather than modification times.

I post to LiveJournal using Xjournal, a pretty and featureful client for OS X. If I want to post from the command line, I use Charm.

Scripting:

I prefer Python to Perl for scripting tasks. As Yoda says, you will know Python is better than perl when your code you try to read six months from now.

Mudding:

I use Mudwalker when I have the OS X GUI available, mainly because I’ve made it talk using the Mac’s speech synthesis stuff. I’d also recommend Crystal.

Coding:

From within Vim, I make heavy use of ctags and cscope for browsing around code and jumping to declarations and references to a symbol. You can do it with grep, but it’s not as nice (and a lot slower on big projects).

I’ve also used Smatch to write customised static checkers for C code. Smatch is a modified version of GCC which outputs an intermediate language which is readily processed by your scripting language of choice. If you’ve ever found yourself writing Perl or Python code to parse C directly, you probably should have used this instead. There are some scripts which come with it which can do useful things like attach state to particular code paths as your script parses the code, and allow you to describe what happens to that state when the paths merge (so you could check that all paths free anything they’ve allocated, say).

8 Comments on "Sanctioned Parts List II"


  1. I still use Pine. In fact, I’m using Pine right now. Apart from anything else, I think it’s the only way to do mailing list management – if there’s a way to do it on Webmail, I don’t know it. I just find it less of a faff to do everything – to create address book entries, to file things, the lot. Easy. And it’s pretty good at blocking viruses!

    Reply

      1. I think lisekit means the mailing list management menus on hermes, which aren’t actually part of Pine but which are accessed by the old telnet interface rather than by the new shiny webmail thing (which we didn’t have when I were a lad).

        Reply

  2. Subject: My two euro cents
    Mail: outlook 11 (work) / Gmail (personal) News: Google groups (only light usage) Editting: Ultraedit (has FTP load/save support) Browsing: Firefox (of course) Uploading: Windows Explorer (makes an FTP site work like a folder) Scripting: N/A Coding: Visual Studio.NET 2005 beta 1 (some of my colleagues swear by Eclipse)

    Reply

  3. Subject: Can you go from slrn to safari directly?
    You use slrn and safari. Do you know how to define safari as your browser so that selecting a url in slrn will launch it in safari?

    Reply

    1. Subject: Re: Can you go from slrn to safari directly?
      I added the following to .slrnc:

      set non_Xbrowser “open %s”
      set Xbrowser “open %s”

      (I’m not sure whether .slrnrc considers X to be running or not when it’s running from a terminal on the Aqua desktop, so I set both: it seems to work).

      Reply

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