Ask HN: Netbooks for hacking and development?

2 pointsclay1 comment

So I'd like to use my AA1 for a little more than web surfing and AIM. VI, Emacs and the standard command line tools allow for fairly easy hacking in minimal space, but jeeze, I never thought I'd get so lost in that tiny screen. I actually thought I would be less distracted on this thing.

Does anyone have thoughts on developing in such a small space?

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I use an EEE 701. I mostly work at the command line with Vi for programming. Occasionally I'll look at code in KWrite. If I need an IDE, I often use Arachnophilia, which is a pretty stripped down but easy to configure IDE that recognizes syntax for a number of languages.

You can also use Eclipse or NetBeans, but it takes a lot of configuring. For myself, I ended up taking both off my drive, since I found that I was doing most of my work in a terminal window even after I'd cleared up a reasonable amount of screen space in both.

It depends on what you want from your dev environment.

And if distraction is a problem, turn off wireless. ;)

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