I was just going through my feeds, which I read in the OS X Terminal with Canto, and I thought it was interesting just how much time I spend in the terminal, and how I seem to rely more and more on the command line for speed and efficiency. As a schooled designer with a long career in art and creative direction, it’s strange enough that I use vim, but if you think that’s weird, here’s the rundown of the terminal/cli apps I use most frequently:
- Writing, coding: vim (usually MacVim, to my credit as a visual person, thank you)
- E-mail: mutt (I know. But really, my skin has a healthy glow and I do go outside and enjoy the sun)
- IRC: irssi
- RSS: canto
- Twitter: twitvim
- Written documents: LaTeX
- Drupal: drush (Drush rocks.)
- Task management: Taskwarrior
It seems weird, but for me, these types of activities don’t need eye candy, but effectiveness and speed. And these apps provide that. They are also all free to use and work on several platforms.
I’m especially happy with mutt and canto. Mail and feeds, in the amounts I consume them, usually take up huge amounts of time. With these apps, I can zip through them relatively quickly.
Now, if you’d said you used Emacs, I’d been really surprised!