Making my working environment portable
Last substantive revision: 2016-08-28
Just some notes for now.
- Making configuration files for common programs (vim, etc.) available online.
- Difficulties with this: different operating systems might have different software or versions of the same software available, making configuration files apply inconsistently; some parts of configuration files refer to local parts in the file system that might not exist in all systems (e.g. my music player configuration file points to an external drive that only exists for my laptop) and these programs might not offer ways to make configuration files conditional on existence of such paths; some operating systems ship with their own default configuration files (e.g. Debian ships with
debian.vimwhich does things like disable modelines in Vim, others ship with default versions of~/.bashrc), which presents difficulties with respect to merging these separate configuration files.
- Difficulties with this: different operating systems might have different software or versions of the same software available, making configuration files apply inconsistently; some parts of configuration files refer to local parts in the file system that might not exist in all systems (e.g. my music player configuration file points to an external drive that only exists for my laptop) and these programs might not offer ways to make configuration files conditional on existence of such paths; some operating systems ship with their own default configuration files (e.g. Debian ships with
- Placing more things in public/online (especially on GitHub) so they’re easily accessible.
- Dealing with “cloud software”
- Also the problem of remembering passwords when using an arbitrary computer
- One problem I’ve had: I like to use Linux Mint for my main computer, but some of my old computers (which I use once in a while) have Debian, and UW CSE lab computers use Fedora. Dealing with different distros and versions of software on computers is slightly tricky (e.g. compiling documents with LaTeX or Pandoc could yield different output). Even dealing with Vim plugins is slightly tricky, since e.g. Fedora’s Vim doesn’t seem to have Python (so things like UltiSnips don’t work) – actually, I just needed to use the
vimxbinary. - Most of the time this isn’t such a big deal. I have a laptop that I can take with me pretty much anywhere, so everything is already set up in terms of software (though there is still the challenge of setting up the physical working surface).
One way to deal with this is to learn how to work efficiently with the defaults of the most commonly available software. So something like knowing the shortcuts for Bash, Vim, and Firefox/Chrome. Though of course, if you’re going to work for an extended period of time at a new machine, then it probably makes sense to try to copy over some config files. See also “On Configuration”. Rob Pike says something interesting in an interview:
I don’t install a lot of extra stuff on those Macs, mostly to reduce maintenance. I like the freedom to wipe and reinstall without losing my world
External links
- How to Efficiently Work Offline by Vipul Naik
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