So I recently switched my linux flavor to Gentoo on my laptop. It takes a couple days, but has proven to be well worth it. Although that’s not the topic of this post, it should be understood that the following instructions are based on a Gentroo distro. These instructions can be tweaked to get this working in other distros as well.

There are a couple apps involved: cowsay, and fortune-mod. The fortune-mod app is a simple app that outputs fortunes, there are a number of plugins (I installed them all, but you can choose to emerge particular ones, as desired.

The cowsay app is a simple ascii cow that has a comment bubble allowing you to specify the text the cow should say. It has some customizeable features such as the eyes and the tongue.

The following instructions will get your ascii cow to output a fortune from the fortune-mod library.

First, you need to emerge these packages (the fortune-mod-all package is optional, although you need a fortune list, this pulls them all in:

emerge -av cowsay fortune-mod fortune-mod-all

Now you can output a cowsay fortune:

cowsay `fortune`

I took this a level further and added the preceeding to the last line in my .bashrc file, which has a random fortune popup on every terminal/console session entry.

It’s a lot of fun and a simple install. Have fun!!

So as I’ve mentioned in many of my other posts, I’ve been using linux for the last couple of years. I’ve found that there are a number of editors available and everybody has their own preference. Ultimately, the best editor depends on what your goals are for the editor. It’s hard to get ahold of the complete package with an open-source solution. Especially, if you want something you can open and use immediately, without much of a tutorial.

I primarily use these editors for PHP, ColdFusion, Ruby on Rails, Javascript, SQL, HTML and CSS.

I have used the following editors, so I’ll cover my experiences with them briefly.