Editor (and other) customisations

A discussion the other night suggested that I’m quite unusual among geeks in doing vanishingly little customisation of my system – most of my systems have something very close to their default configuration, individual programs are usually at most a very few tweaks away from their upstream settings.

For Emacs all I tend to do is install revbufs, set Linux mode by default for C and turn on syntax highlighting and line number mode (sometimes the last two only get done when I start Emacs). For vim it’s just configuring a 72 column word wrap if my main use for vi on the system will be writing e-mail. For GNOME it’s putting a terminal launcher in one of the panels and setting focus follows mouse. All very trivial stuff done in five minutes.

The theory here is partly that I just can’t be bothered to spend more time on tweaking things (and the subsequent carrying around of those tweaks) and partly that it ensures that I’m not confused when I end up using a new system or someone else’s for whatever reason. I find it somewhat odd that this would be something you’d want to spend any time on.