Windows vs Linux [was: p2exe using wine/cxoffice]

[Chris F.A. Johnson]

On 2005-10-26, Tim Golden wrote:
> [Sybren Stuvel]
>
> Tim Golden enlightened us with:
>> > Well, I'm with you. I'm sure a lot of people will chime in to point
>> > out just how flexible and useful and productive Linux is as a
>> > workstation, but every time I try to use it -- and I make an honest
>> > effort -- I end up back in Windows
>
>> I'm curious, what do you mean with "it" in the part "every time I try
>> to use it"?
>
> Fair question. I have, over the years, installed and used Gentoo,
> Vector, RH, Ubuntu Breezy (my current choice) and various other 
> flavours and distros. When I "use it" I mean typically that I use 
> whatever desktop-type thing presents itself to me -- Gnome or XFCE 
> or Fluxbox, say -- one or more editors (I tend to try things out to
> see if they suit), and one or more command shells.

   All distros look the same to me, because I have an environment that
   I like, and I keep my home directory acros distros.

> As it happens, (and I suspect I'll have to don my flameproof suit here),
> I prefer the Windows command line to bash/readline for day-to-day use, 
> including in Python. Why? Because it does what I can't for the life of 
> me get readline to do: you can type the first few letters of a 
> previously-entered command and press F8. This brings up (going backwards
> with further presses) the last command which starts like that. And
> *then* you can just down-arrow to retrieve the commands which
> followed it. If someone can tell me how to do this with
> bash/readline I will be indebted to them and it will increase my
> chances of switching to Linux a bit! (Although not at work where I
> have no choice!)

    In my ~/.inputrc:

"\e[a": history-search-backward  ## shift+up-arrow
"\e[b": history-search-forward   ## shift+down-arrow


-- 
    Chris F.A. Johnson                     <http://cfaj.freeshell.org>
    ==================================================================
    Shell Scripting Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach, 2005, Apress
    <http://www.torfree.net/~chris/books/cfaj/ssr.html>