I'm in the process of completely switching over to the development style described in this article (I read it last weekend). I started typing a response to this

I'm in the process of completely switching over to the development style described in this article (I read it last weekend). I started typing a response to this and accidentally ended the first sentence with a semicolon, if that gives you any indication of where I am at in this process. I'm at a PHP/.Net shop doing LAMP development and everyone else here simply installed Ubuntu or Windows XP/7 then Eclipse, checked out the code from SVN and started working. I installed Ubuntu fairly quickly but then got fed up trying to get Eclipse and a bunch of PHP plugins working together. That was a complete waste of time in my opinion; at best I would be learning Eclipse and Ubuntu. I switched to Vim for all of my editing needs about 16 months ago when I was taking a useless Perl class, so I started using that daily at work. 8 months of 40 hour work weeks later and I'd say I'm pretty decent at it now. Two months ago I got fed up with the awful window management in Ubuntu and switched to Xmonad. Configuring my window manager by writing Haskell and recompiling it is preferable to watching some other piece of garbage break or crash constantly and wasting time moving windows around with a mouse for the rest of my life. Shortcuts didn't help; working with the default keybindings in Ubuntu for web development on a single screen hurt my hand enough to buy a different keyboard, but it was still glitchy enough to be a daily annoyance. My development environment currently consists of Ubuntu/Arch Linux (haven't switched at work yet), Tmux, Vim, Xmonad, Urxvt and Zsh. The only sane way to start moving towards using these tools is to use one new tool at a time, see which defaults annoy you and then customize it to your workflow. I would definitely not start with anyone else's default settings (Janus for Vim or Oh-My-Zsh) unless you just want to see what these tools are capable of. Last week I completed a full productive workday without touching my mouse except to move it out of the way and over the weekend I had to work from home at this job for the first time. I had my ssh tunnels and keys setup already so it was a simple as attaching to my tmux session from work and continuing where I left off. The reason I am going through this process is to learn more about Linux/Unix but more importantly I am sick and tired of setting up programs on computers, learning settings and modifying configurations through guis that change at the developers' whims. I don't need or want a system that anyone can use; I want a system that works the way I think with my exact hardware. The best benefit of doing all this is that I can actually learn and understand what my tools are doing and remove as many abstractions as I can handle. Most recently I learned about strace; I always wondered how people came up with answers to Linux questions about random dependencies.