Monday, February 16, 2009
Nothing to fear...
Lately I've been having a bit of an itch to try out a tilling WM. I see screenshots of people having a grand old time with awesome or dwm or any of the other (I'm sure many) tiling windows managers. Also the small footprint, noted many times and recently by k.mandla, is pretty appealing, as well.

However I can't convince myself to really install, configure, and then get used to not using my mouse. I realize you can still use the mouse, obviously, but there's something about floating WMs that makes me feel more comfortable when using my computer.

The same goes with Vi/Vim, I suppose. I understand that it's a much more powerful text editor than, say, nano or pico. When being used, though, I feel a bit wary that I might hit the wrong key combo and wipe my entire document. And, if given the opportunity, I'd probably use leafpad over nano any day.

Obviously this is just me being a worry wart; Linux used to make me feel the same way. I felt like at a moments notice I could destroy the entire system.

The feeling of not having full control over where one's data resides is, I'm sure, a common fear. I'm starting to understand how new computer users or inexperienced computer users feel when they first fire up their brand-new machine and don't quite know what exactly is going on at any moment. Heck, some don't even know where their files are logically located on their hard drives.

I'm starting to understand more and more about how computer users (or anyone with information, for that matter) operate. It's all about comfort zones.