A few that come to mind, some less known, some more:xargs or parallel: run things in parallel, with lots of optionssed and awk: more well-known but still super useful for processing text files, and faster than Python or Rubym4: simple macro processorscreen: powerful terminal multiplexing and session persistenceyes: print a string a lotcal: nice calendarenv: run a command (useful in scripts)look: find English words (or lines in a file) beginning with a stringcut and paste and join: data manipulationfmt: format text paragraphspr: format text into pages/columnsfold: wrap lines of textcolumn: form...

Charlie Kindel (who left Microsoft earlier this year after 21 years, most recently as a Windows Phone General Manager), posted today on an “impedance mismatch” between carriers and device manufacturers, and Windows Phone, where those carriers and OEMs are “reluctant” to push Windows Phone, while Google’s Android has taken an approach that “reduces friction with carriers & device manufacturers at the expense of end users”.Kindel seems to be implying that Microsoft has taken the road less travelled, choosing to fight it out with the carriers and OEM...

There is a class of messages which are generated on demandrather than explicitly posted into a message queue.If you call Get­Message or Peek­Messageand the queue is empty,then the window manager will look to see if one of thesegenerated-on-demand messages is due,messages likeWM_TIMER,WM_MOUSE­MOVE,and WM_PAINT.Neil wonders,"In that program that called Invalidate­Rect 100,000 times,how many paint messages were generated?"The Zen answer to this question is "Yes."A more practical answer is "As many as you can get."When somebody calls Invalidate­Rect,the window manager adds the spec...

I’ve had an off/on relationship with Vim for the past many years.Before, I never felt like we understood each other properly. Vim isalmost useless without plugins and some essential settings in .vimrc, but fiddling with all the knobs andinstalling all the plugins that I thought I needed was a process that inthe end stretched out from few hours to weeks, months even; and it theend it just caused frustration instead of making me a happier coder.Recently, I decided to give Vim another shot. This time around it wasdifferent – something in my brain switched and now for the first ti...

In less than one minute, it's now possible to build the Linux kernel from source on a desktop.Besides finishing up the Phoronix Test Suite 3.6-Arendal release this weekend, on Saturday I began running some new Intel CPU benchmarks. In building the Linux 3.1 kernel for x86_64 in a default configuration (make defconfig), I've now managed to trim down the compile time to less than sixty seconds on a single-socket desktop system. Similar speeds can be achieved out of multi-socket servers and other configurations, but this is the first time I'm seeing such kernel build speeds out of a single proces...

I have been using Emacs for over a year now. I actually didn’t learn a lot when I started using it (just the basics to get going and then some relatively common keyboard shortcuts), but lately I have been reading and learning much more about it. I’m so grateful by everything I’ve learned from different people on the net that I wanted to share a couple of things I’ve learned, and a simple major mode for editing AsciiDoc documents.As a long-time VIM user, I feel it’s my duty to make a micro-introduction to Emacs to VIM users (skip this whole paragraph if you...

PreludeIf you are a professional writer – i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed – Emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish.Neal StephensonIn the Beginning … Was the Command LineI’m an Emacs user and I’m proud of the fact. I know my reasons for using it (and loving it) for many years now. But many people don’t. I often get asked by various people the same qu...

An emacs keyboard macro is just a recording of user input into emacs, which means that most anything you can do in emacs can be recorded as a macro. Read that again. Pretty powerful.Here’s how it works. To start recording, typeC-x (and input the commands in your macro. Then typeC-x )to stop recording. Then typeC-x eto apply the macro once, orC-u 0 C-x eto apply the macro until the bell rings or end of buffer is reachedKeep in mind that you must not ring the bell when defining a keyboard macro (by accident, or with C-g). If you do, you’ll have to start all over defining your keybo...