Setup

I run Cygwin (with X-windows) on Windows XP, both on my laptop and on my PC at work.

I have SAS and Matlab installed on my desktop, but I prefer to ssh to the servers that have these programs (grid, rnd and leda at Stern, and wrds at WRDS) and work on them instead, because they are much faster, because a large part of the data I use is on WRDS, and because this means I can run multiple jobs. Additionally, my PC does not become unavailable while it runs an especially long SAS job.

The possible problem with running programs on the servers is that I cannot use the GUIs. This is no loss. I detest the GUIs because the each editor has keystrokes peculiar to the language, which means that I cannot use a set of commands that work in one editor in another. The wonderful alternative is Emacs.

I use GNU Emacs on X-windows for all my editing. I also (and here is the wonderful bit) use the Emacs shell on the servers, instead of relying on the shell in the terminal window. This means that all the editing keystrokes I learned for Emacs are available on the command line^[1] . I just have to learn to stop closing the buffer that contains the shell. This is not a serious problem, but it does mean that my command history is not always available when I open a new Emacs shell.

Why not run Linux on my desktop? I do not have permission. How about my laptop then? My laptop is dual-boot XP and SUSE Linux 10.0, but I haven't figured out yet how to make ndiswrapper work with my network card. I also want to install Ubuntu, because there are some aesthetic features of SUSE that I dislike. So until I do both these, I'm a Windows man.

Not that I use Windows for much. I run a browser, a media player, and the Scrabble interface from the Internet Scrabble Club. I also run Thunderbird, but I'm trying to figure out how to work mutt on Cygwin, again because I want to be able to use Emacs to compose and reply to emails. The problem with mutt is that I may have to do all my [Emacs] editing within the terminal, and not in the separate Emacs window, with all its glorious colours. We shall see.

I also program in perl, but I do that largely locally, because I have not been able to successfully install perl modules (from CPAN) on systems where I am not root.

Footnotes:

^[1] I know that there is an ``editor'' available at the command line, which is a great help. For instance, Ctrl-r allows you to enter a string with which to search your history. However, the emacs shell also behaves naturally with Gauss on the command line, whereas the terminal window behaves terribly. Command completion is not available. Nor can you recall previous commands.