Separator Screen Shot

Lifehacker had a pretty neat post yesterday which added “a Handy Separator Between Commands in Your Terminal on Mac OS X and Linux.” I use a Cygwin terminal on my Windows machine, and the Linux script almost worked: the dashes didn’t print. I tracked down my particular problem to the COLUMNS variable used to calculate how many dashes to print in the separator. In my Cygwin terminal prompt, running “export $COLUMNS” showed the variable was blank; meaning that no dashes were used for the separator. Looking at the Mac modification, I noticed that it used the command “shopt -s checkwinsize” to check the window size and if necessary update the LINES and COLUMNS variables. So after adding these two lines to the beginning of the Linux “.bash_ps1″ script, here https://github.com/emilis/emilis-config/blob/master/.bash_ps1, the separator worked for my Cygwin terminal.

shopt -s checkwinsize
export COLUMNS

I knew that I was getting it. Nancy wanted to get me a laptop for Christmas, since my last one died early in 2007. I had been reading about the Asus Eee PC. I showed Nancy that she could order it from Newegg.com. She did. It arrived in October. Newegg’s return policy for laptops allows 30 days from delivery, so she had me open it and make sure that it worked. Once I verified that it worked, I had to repackage it. Nancy then whisked it away and wrapped it up.

I have been using it for a bit over a week now. I like it a lot. I am a Linux geek, so the Linux OS on the laptop is perfect for me. It is amazing small and portable. I have pretty much gotten used to the small keyboard. The “shift” key on the far right is a bit farther out than I am used to, and I keep pushing the “up” arrow key instead. The small screen is very sharp. This makes the small screen quite usable. And with the solid-state flash drive, it boots quickly.