note: I hope this is not perceived to be a massively OT post ;-)

I currently find myself torn between two worlds. At work, all of my Perl hacking takes place on a bunch of Solaris 8 boxes. Whereas at home, I have been stuck with a Windows box for quite some time. Needless to day, my personal preference lies with a *nix system when it comes to perl programming, xml munching, playing pipes etc etc.

Being a fast typer, I find navigating in *nix shell prompt much faster than clicking my way through never ending pile of clumsy windows (sticky door handles, broken glass, and so on ;-). Also, any corner I turn on a *nix system, there’s always a handful of.. ehem.. handy tools (vi, emacs, cvs, man, perldoc, cp, mv, more, less, …) accessible only a couple keystrokes away (for example, launching ‘vi’ takes 2 key strokes plus an extra for the return character…).


On my Windows box, unfortunately, everything seems to take much longer to do. In fact, I have been noticing that my productivity on Windows system compared to a *nix system decreased tenfold. I just can’t seem to do things as fast as I know I’m able to on a *nix system. Every step I make in a Windows environment and I fall through a major crack. Just the other day, I was trying to install a module from CPAN on my Windows system. Every attempt to do so was met with quite resistance by the OS, most often culminating in a blue screen. I also found that debugging any perl script via the MS DOS prompt is a challenging task. Due to the size constraints of an MS DOS prompt window, browsing through my code using the ‘w’ command of the Perl debugger is excruciatingly painful as lines of Perl end up being wrapped a couple times…

Please, don’t consider this node to be a personal attack on any one system. I’m sure there might be some Perl hackers who find the contrary to hold true for them. The whole reason I’m writing this is to seek out the guidance of fellow monks and share my plight with them.

At this stage, I’m seriously considering buying a new hard drive and installing the latest version of Red Hat Linux on my Pentium 733 MHz, 256MB Ram system. I’ll have to make it a dual boot as I still have to share the computer with my brother, who’s using Windows mostly for gaming.

I would also appreciate it immensely if you could describe the system you use for work or at home. Which works best for you? Any suggestions on how I can make the most out of my present system, at least until I outfit with a *nix OS?

UPDATE: atcroft: Thanks for the suggestion. I've been playing with Cygwin for some time now... and getting used to it gradually ;)

UPDATE 1: for the record, I am running Windows ME ;//.

_____________________ 
$"=q;grep;;$,=q"grep";for(`find . -name ".saves*~"`){s;$/;;;/(.*-(\d+)
+-.*)$/;
$_=<a HREF="/index.pl?node=%22ps%20-e%20-o%20pid%20"> "," $2 </a>;`@$_
+`?{print"+ $1"}:{print"- $1"}&&`rm $1`;
print$\;}

[download]

In reply to Perl hacker’s tools of trade or hardware of choice.. by vladb

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.