Editing Text
If you want to do low-level (or even mid-level, really) things with computers, you need a powerful text editor. There are many and I'm sure they're all great, but I've settled on vim. Oh, look at that, Bram's replaced the index page with a protest against software patents. Good for him. Living in the US, it is a little hard to feel like one can do anything useful about the issue, but it's good that Euros still have a chance at preventing the insanity that software patents lead to.

But I was talking about vim. The one thing that gets me every time, is that the default settings aren't quite what I'd like. So, to save myself some trouble in the future, allow me to present my ~/.vimrc file:

syntax on
set autoindent
set nocompatible
set expandtab
set tabstop=4
set shiftwidth=2
set textwidth=72

[/code]