Tangential Tweaking: Your Most OCD quest for perfection

Question

We've all had that moment when we realize that we have just spent hours fiddling with .conf and .rc files, adjusting keymaps, recompiling/emerge world'ing our entire system, hunting down .dll's, slaying dragons and saving lusty wrenches, and occasional wizardry, in order to do a few minutes of actual coding.

I wonder, what is the most amount of effort you have ever put into making your programming environment just right, versus how it related to real work you were trying to get done.

Answer 1

Does setting up Cygwin just so I could use grep instead of Ctrl+F count?

Answer 2

Installing and configuring Gentoo Stage 1, all the applications I needed and configuring an Openbox theme and hotkey configuration I liked...

All to do a semester's worth of Linux coding in college.

I still use the system and love it but it's come a long way since the days of being able to Stage 1. I don't plan on ever devoting the computer to 3 days worth of compilation for a speedup I can't perceive ever again.

Answer 3

At work at most 1 day, in one go, per project.

I try to make my machine as standard as possible. Default Windows XP setup, default Eclipse, default Putty and if needed default Cygwin and maven. I generally have a complete eclipse installation per project, which allows me to zip up the whole eclipse installation complete with project specific settings, put it on a disc and restore it later. Switching existing projects takes me all of 5 minutes.

That way I can spend most of my time where it really matters, my code. Another advantage of this setup is that I learn to use standard tools, which are probably also available at the customer's site at the moment of panic.

Answer 4

After I set up a new account, I always put the following lines in my ~/.inputrc:

set editing-mode vi
set mark-symlinked-directories on

It's so familiar that I can remember the whole incantation, as such. :-P

I also take the effort to set up the Nimbus theme, and to have a bunch of standard fonts I use ready at hand. (In particular, the Liberation fonts.) See an example of both the Nimbus theme and the Liberation fonts at http://cloud9.hedgee.com/priv/4444.png. :-) (Look at the signature scroll bars, and the fonts used in the menu/titlebar.)

Answer 5

Trying to get the whitespace juuuust right on an HTML application going to be used by 4 people internally.

Answer 6

I type in the following lines when I move to a new system:

$ svn export https://.../.../configuration ~/configuration
$ for file in configuration/.*; do ln -sf $file .; done

Ready to go.

Answer 7

So far I'm approximately 6 years into an occasional project to make myself a personal website.

I haven't written a single thing to go on it yet, but I have written:

• Two text->html conversion things (like markdown/textile)
• Several content management systems, none of which are very good
• A couple of largely abandoned javascript frameworks and utility libraries
• A document-based storage engine
• My own (really bad) webserver
• An entire framework for managing a webserver

..and probably lots of other silly things.

I'm sure in ten year's time i'll be writing my own browser to view it with or something.

Answer 8

Do you mean "tangential tweaking" or tap dancing around and not sitting down and getting some work done on the task in hand?

Answer 9

digging around in the windows start menu, arranging them all in perfectly categorized folders, only to discover that some programs should belong in multiple folders..

half a year later i had to reinstall the box..