In Which OS Do You Feel More Productive?

HTMLChecker asks: "I found an article in which the author talks about how she is more productive using Mac OS X. What about the people of Slashdot? Where do you feel more productive, in Linux? Windows? DOS? Mac OS X? Also, what is the best way to rate productivity in an OS?"

Comments

Science's dependence on MS Office

[Noksagt]

As a scientist, where I do most of my work in MS Office...I basically have to use MS Office because I need to interoperate with my peers and coworkers.

This is sad, but true. If I am primary author, I do it in LaTeX & get it done in a tenth of the time. But people are locked into Word & Powerpoint and my life is occasionally made a little more painful because of that. OO.o and abiword go a long way, as does latex2rtf. Depending on how much content I am creating, it is often faster to use my preferred tools: LaTeX and vim.

Furthermore, Excel (every scientists best friend), is still far and away the best spreadsheet application and to me is Window's so called "killer app".

While Excel is a fine enough spreadsheet (I can't think of anything I like from it that Gnumeric and OO.o don't do), most scientists need much more than a spreadsheet. They need an industrial strength plotting program, a'la Microcal Origin, Kaleidagraph, grace, gnuplot, Matlab, Igor, hippodraw, etc. It isn't my best friend & even the people who are stuck on Word that I collaborate with discourage anyone from using Excel for anything other than quick & dirty.

Re:OS X

[therevolution]

Doesn't work properly, or doesn't work how you expect it to? Two different things...

Anyway, what you want is Command+LeftArrow and Command+RightArrow. That goes to beginning of line and end of line, respectively, on OS X.

Re:OS X

[joh]

I like OS X, but every time I've used it I am amazed that Home/End doesn't work properly.

Create a file ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict with this content:

/* Home/End keys like Windows */
{
"\UF729" = "moveToBeginningOfLine:"; /* home */
"\UF72B" = "moveToEndOfLine:"; /* end */
"$\UF729" = "moveToBeginningOfLineAndModifySelection:"; /* shift + home */
"$\UF72B" = "moveToEndOfLineAndModifySelection:"; /* shift + end */
}

Re:It depends

[Porter Doran]

There is no real limitation to the window managers you can run in OS X, using X11.

Learning LaTeX

[Noksagt]

If you want to benefit from it without learning it, you can use a number of GUIs. Scientific Workplace on win32 (commercial, but good to push on those using Word) or LyX (F/OSS) for nearly any platform or many others. Even abiword can write LaTeX!

It isn't difficult to learn & becomes much more powerful when you eventually ditch the GUI & either use a quality TeX-focused editor like KILE (KDE), TeXnicCenter (win32), TeXShop (OS X) (all F/OSS) or your favorite multi-purpose editor. I prefer vim with LaTeX-Suite.

The best way to learn is to look at other code. Either get some from peers, from the net, or make some in either the GUIs or the friendlier editors. Then just write.

If you need a reference, you can usually learn to google for how to do something (or post to comp.text.tex). I maintain a list of www links. You might find something useful, but I can't suggest the best starting point from that list. The best introductory book I've used is Guide to LaTeX. The other books in LaTeX Companions are also excellent for reference, particularly The LaTeX Companion.

Re:OS X

[daviddennis]

One thing that's not too well known in MacOS X is that a nice subset of emacs commands works.

So if you want to go to the beginning of a line, Control-A does it, and Control-E goes to the end of the line.

I love this because I don't have to take my hands off the home keys to make it work. It's a real godsend to die-hard emacs users such as myself.

(This works only in Cocoa applications, so Internet Explorer users are out of luck, but in most programs, such as Safari, Mail, OmniWeb, etc, it works great.)

D

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