My Dot Files

This post is to follow up on the previous one.  I recently brought up a new Windows system and installed Cygwin.  Rather than simply save my dot files in a safe location, I decided to do a short write up on them.

.cshrc.local

I use C shell (tcsh) and not bash. Based on my experiences, I've observed that it is the preferred shell in the world of hardware engineering.  I won't argue here, the discussion about bash vs. tcsh is not worth any of my spare cycles.  I don't tend to need much more than the default settings and I seem to have converged on the following options:

set history=1000
set ignoreeof     # Don't let ^D exit the shell
set notify        # Print message when background jobs complete
set autoexpand    # Expand history when completing

bindkey -k down history-search-forward # Essential, see my previous blog post
bindkey -k up history-search-backward

alias df 'df -h'    # Print sizes in human readable format
alias du 'du -h'
alias g  'egrep -i' # Default to egrep and ignore case
alias h  'history'
alias l  'less'
alias la 'ls -a'
alias ll 'ls -l'
alias ls 'ls --color'
alias rg  'g -r'    # Alias for recursive grep
alias vi  'vim'     # Shortcut for vim and gvim
alias gi  'gvim'

.vimrc

It wasn't until I switch to vim (not vi) that I begun to call myself not-an-emacs user.  I have never been comfortable with legacy vi key mappings, so I disable compatibility within vim.  In addition to that setting, I typically set the following ones:

" Allow backspace to work in insert mode
set backspace=indent,eol,start

" Use VIM settings, rather than Vi settings
set nocompatible

" " Enable default ruler and always display status line
set ruler
set laststatus=2

" Indentation, use spaces not tabs
set shiftwidth=4
set tabstop=4
set expandtab

" Search
set ignorecase
set hlsearch
set incsearch
set nowrap

rxvt and .Xdefaults

I use the rxvt-native package for my Cygwin console rather than Microsoft's vanilla console or (name of your variant of) xterm + X11 server.  It works very well.  To run rxvt.exe, I created a shortcut to the following command line:

E:\cygwin\bin\rxvt.exe -display :0 -fn "Lucida Console-14" -tn rxvt-cygwin-native -e /bin/tcsh -l

Rather than use option -rv for reverse video (dark background, light foreground), I set the following options in my .Xdefaults file.  rxvt-native will use the values specified in this file even though it does not require an X server.

 rxvt*background: Black
 rxvt*foreground: LightGrey