User applications

Overall
Minimalist and efficient. Ideally only run software which I can tweak for my own usage. Understand as much as possible. Be a control and performance freak.

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The window manager: fvwm2
Small memory footprint. Keyboard driven. At most 2 applications per page at a time.

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The terminal emulator: mrxvt
I am currently studying and modifying the code for my own use. I really like the tab support. Still not as complete as xterm (no UTF8 support for example). My mrxvt has been trimmed from all the visual stuff I deem unnecessary. I removed the -g flag from the final build and it is presently at 316K. I'm using the XFT functions for drawing fonts which don't support UTF-8 as of yet. I am hence currently looking at XFT functions which can either handle UTF-8 straight or maybe I'll do the conversion to another encoding first like UTF-16. More on this in next post...

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The editor: vim
I am very impressed with vim but not that proficient yet. Smaller and faster than emacs. Very extensible for programming (ctag support).

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The web browser: firefox or links?
This might be the most dependencies-hungry application I'll require. links is small and I have some hope of understanding and customising the source. firefox is huge and the code base seems huge. I don't think I'll be able to do with links only.

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The email client: mutt?
I already use an ssh tunnel to get my mail from my POP server with thunderbird. Using fetchmail with mutt offer much better performance.

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C code browsing tools
Exuberant ctags. Cscope. Cflow.

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