Well, I started writing something, and got a good ways along, but I'm not going to get done tonight. So I'm going to pull another get-out-of-jail card and post my Essentials list.

  • Ubuntu. My desktop & laptop both run 8.04 right now, although I might go to 8.10 soon. My servers also run 8.04. I also keep a laptop with Vista around for playing Call of Duty and running Chrome.

  • Speaking of servers, shouldn't those kinda count? I use EC2, using the Ubuntu 8.04 images from Alestic.

  • Gmail for mail. Chrome plays a large part in my not missing Thunderbird at all.

  • Emacs is my emacsitor. There are many like it, but this one is mine. I use a CVS build - well, Git, actually - so that I get Multi-TTY. What I end up with is uber-cool - I start Emacs in my screen session, then attach it with emacsclient -c. Even if X crashes, I still have my Emacs going. This is a big part of why I'm up to about 800 buffers open at my work desktop. My laptop has 300ish.

  • Oh, right, screen. If you ever have 2 terminals open, you should probably be using screen. Here's my screenrc. Includes a persistent status bar and the hostname, which helps since I'm also pretty indiscriminate about keeping screen instances going on all the servers I connect to.

  • Firefox 3, primarily. A bunch of extensions, pretty much what you'd expect, but an extra shout-out to Tree Style Tabs. I've pretty much reached the conclusion that Firefox needs something like desktop switching in Linux, maybe even tag-based window switching like awesome, but Tree-Style Tabs is holding me over just fine. I also run Google Reader and Gmail in a Prism instance, so it doesn't balloon my main Firefox instance's memory. Like I mentioned before, I keep a Vista laptop around for Chrome, but that's a pretty distant second.

  • Quod Libet and mpd equally for music. Quod Libet more for building playlists, but it hogs my audio driver; I can also drive mpd remotely, which helps to put on music without getting out of my seat in the living room. (I demonstrate this when people come over show my inner alpha geek.)

Bash is my shell, rxvt-unicode as my terminal... but those are kind of boring.

Okay, that's it for today. If you're in the US, go vote tomorrow.