Ask HN: What's your "setup?" | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's your "setup?"

3 pointsmcantor4 comments

Everyone has different needs out of their computers. Recently, my old Ubuntu laptop's hard drive died, and I've been doing 100% of my gaming, developing and Photoshopping on the shiny Windows XP desktop that I built a little over a year ago. (I SSH into my Linux VPSes for development, using Windows as nothing more than a dumb terminal into my screen sessions.) For code & contact emergencies on the go, I've been using my new smartphone for IM and SSH.

Unfortunately, this leaves me without a clean, organized, subversion-managed home directory, and without a crontab to schedule backups to an external or remote hard drive. I saw the laptop's HD death coming, so I had everything backed up; if I lost the HD in my Windows box, I'd be royally hosed. I'm also wondering if I really need a laptop at all. As I consider the evolution of my computer ecosystem, I would love to hear how everyone else does it. What's your computer/server "setup?" What are your needs?

My only computer's the laptop, a 17" Macbook Pro. It's probably a bit too big—next computer I get I'll drop down to 15"—but it's not a computer I anticipate getting rid of any time soon. It's a bit grungy, but it works beautifully.

OS X for the main operating system. Nothing on the menubar but battery life, Dropbox, FuzzyClock, and Alarm Clock.app. Dock's hidden by default and has nothing on it but the programs I open myself. No stacks.

I constantly run SterCleanDesk, which moves anything I put on the desktop to a storage folder, Google Quick Search Box, which is my launcher, and Fresh, which has two compartments, one for recently modified applications and one for storage. In storage I also keep my most-used folders, so when I need to navigate I just open up Fresh. I use the basic Apple programs for most things (iTunes, Safari, TextEdit, Mail), iWork for making pretty documents, Scrivener for screenplays, Coda for programming, Transmission for torrents, Skype for chatting, and iSquint and Max for file conversion.)

It's a pretty dream set-up. It stays completely out of my way and it does everything I want with minimal interference. I've tried adding to-do lists to my routine—I have a hard-on for Things—but I find that I really don't have a reason to prod myself into productivity. Now I go by my own routine and it works perfectly.

Having recently got this job I have a Mac Mini with 4Gb and a 24 inch monitor. Editing with Textmate and the rest is just the usual command line tools (I'm a rails developer)

The machine is probably overpowered CPU wise (2Ghz, Intel Core 2 Duo) but the ram is a godsend when running the database and the applications together. I could probably work from a laptop but I would be unhappy if I lost the monitors.

The guy working with me has a Mac laptop with the same monitor setup.

At home I have a 15" MacBook Pro.

At work I have a Dell Precision workstation. Core2Quad, 8GB ram, 2x500GB RAID 1, Windows 7. I spend the majority of my time in Eclipse, but I also have VMWare Workstation running 32- and 64-bit Ubuntu.

I do everything from a single core 4GB Win7 laptop and a 23" monitor. All my development work takes places by vim'ing on the production server running multiple webservers (one for dev and the other for live/staging).

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