In a recent post, I looked into powerline, a bash status line utility. Powerline looks pretty cool, and I really wanted to run it, but try as I might, I just couldn’t get it working with my set up. Specifically, it doesn’t work really well with tmux. If you spend as much time on the command line as I do, them tmux is indispensable for serious work. That’s another post, but what I really want to talk about is how I emulated some of Powerline’s features using just the native tmux configuration. In addition, there’s a great Vim plugin, airline, which is sort of a vim only powerline. Using the combination of tmux and vim-airline gives me a status line that I’m really happy with.
There are several schools of thought when it comes to digital note taking and productivity. One school advocates powerful tools such as Evernote, which allows you to take notes, clip articles and images, and save documents into a note. Evernote also has some pretty powerful search functionality that lets you find that data again. The other school advocates simple text. Using the file system, and a plain text editor like Vim or TextMate, or what have you. There are powerful arguments both ways, and I find myself coming down somewhere in the middle. On the one hand, I like Evernote’s ubiquity. It’s on my phone, my laptop and my tablet, and I can save everything from quick shopping lists to clipped articles from the web, to pdf documents. In the case of those pdf’s Evernote will even scan them and make the text searchable. That’s extrememly cool. However, it’s too heavy for actual “notes” and Evernote’s interface is notorious for not being “note friendly”. Things are complicated by the fact that I run Linux on my laptop, and there’s not a good Linux client for Evernote.