Having your enviroment how you like it is very important. I have the small problem that my environments are different at home, work and Uni. Although I do use X at all of them with the same window manager (WindowMaker) so at least there is some consistancy there. I'm starting to think that it might be time to bring them all inline with each other. At work I use wterm with a transparent background, I'll probably change it to a solid background this week since it can be difficult to actually use (looks cool though!).

On your comment about how you write code I'm starting to believe this is a good way to do things. I've just found out about Extreme Programming and this is part of what they suggest. Although, the test cases should be written first... You might be interested in XP, it's kinda cool.

Cheers!