Mark Pilgrim on The Setup | Hacker News Reader

Mark Pilgrim on The Setup

mark.pilgrim.usesthis.com

77 pointsshmichael18 comments

This one is well worth reading. He doesn't just list his kit, he has quite a bit to say on writing and some very interesting ideas about a "dream setup".

This may become a factor in choosing a publisher for future books: the ability to avoid Microsoft Word altogether.

I can relate; writing a book in Word (or OOWriter) is an absolute nightmare. Never again.

(I am also having trouble imagining working on a computer while sitting in a Poang armchair. Your body is not at the right angle to look at something in front of you, really.)

Eric Drexler is said to have hung a monitor from his ceiling so he could read it reclining. Back in the CRT days. (I don't remember the source.)

(I always thought of that as the CRT of Damocles.)

I like the Poäng chair from IKEA, but I don't know how anyone can sit in it all day long at a desk. It's a lounge chair.

Maybe he has one of those ergonomic keyboard trays which would allow him to work at that angle.

http://www.ergodirectusa.com/Keyboard-Trays-s/2.htm

And I don't know how anyone can sit in a desk chair all day long.

Here's how it works: wireless mouse on a table next to me. Keyboard on my lap (with the wire plugged into a front-side USB port). Feet up on the matching Poang footstool. Monitors about six feet away from me on a regular desk. Appropriate text sizes in Emacs and terminal, and appropriate zoom levels in Chromium. (Chromium remembers per-site zoom levels automatically.)

Mark posted a pic of his setup on Twitter : http://wearehugh.com/public/2010/01/the-setup.jpg

I'd love to see a photo of Mark in setting at his desk working from the chair in front of those monitors.

The bit that has surprised and interested me with usesthis.com is how few people they've talked to use Linux, and how many people use OS X.

I mean, I knew OS X was big in the geek market, I just didn't quite realise it was this popular.

Not even near being a designer, but the font on that post is awesome.

Museo Sans. Looks like some of the weights are free-as-in-beer, too.

http://new.myfonts.com/fonts/exljbris/museo-sans/

He writes in raw HTML? Hm.

Could you (or someone else) possibly expand on that? Is writing in raw HTML generally discouraged? I am totally ignorant in this area, but I am curious about it since I admire Mark's formatting and he seems to get a lot done.

I can't speak for the person you're commenting on - that is, I have no idea what the 'Hm' meant. Also, I don't think it's generally discouraged. Lots of people write raw HTML (in some contexts).

But I certainly wouldn't want to write an entire book in HTML - it forces you to type a lot of brackets and tags. I'm sure your editor could take a lot of work off your shoulders, but even at that you end up typing a ton of macros (I would think). In any case, it seems easier to me to type the bulk of it in Markdown (or the like) and only occasionally drop down to raw HTML. To each, his or her own though.

Might be a nice step up from docbook, though.

For longer documents, I haven't written in raw html for quite some time. I use Markdown instead, and had assumed that most everyone (except maybe some web designers) uses some form of prettier markup for writing their longer content-heavy documents; either Markdown, reST, or maybe MoinMoin-style wiki markup. Those seem to be the big three (with reST only making it into that group by virtue of being used for the official Python docs, and thus also for many Python-related projects).

Maybe he uses a translator, like markdown.

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