The question to me is: is there a bigger chance of Apophis hitting Earth than the chance of catastrophic climate change due to anthropogenic global warming? Because that has the western world's attention and money, and Apophis does not.

Try NERDTree. It looks and operates better than project.vim and also handles tabs better.

Where's the fire???

I prefer using Alt-tab or your window manager's equivalent to GNU screen. But to each his own.

Also, make sure you are using a build of gVim for your window manager of choice. I see so many people using regular vim in a terminal. It is much more useful to use a GUI build as you get much nicer tabbed files and OS integration. It does not turn vim into a GUI app; it just wraps it up nice so your window manager can deal with it as a first class application.

This is not informative to anyone who wants to use a recent version of Visual Studio (ie, anything since VS2003) because it does not work. There is a lame workaround to open the file externally in vim and save it back. You need to use ViEmu if you want a vi mode in VS. It is commercial software, but worth it. If you are stuck on VS5 or 6, god help you; a vi mode is not going to save you.

In any case, what the OP is looking for is actually just vim and the knowledge to use it to its full potential. Extending vim is not a "mortal sin," it is very useful and done all the time. There are plugins and examples for everything the OP wants to do, and if he likes vim he will probably like these better than clicky IDE.

Qatar, UAE, China, or the capital cities of some of the other countries would not be so bad. You could probably bribe your way to a long-term visa in many of them. But that list also has "Soviet Union" on it, so I wonder how up to date it is...

Console, a very nice application that has tabs, sane copy/paste functionality, and can be configured to launch bash or whatever you want. Not sure about Unicode.

What does the default mode of a file browser have to do with HIG? HIG means that the menu bar is always in the same place, the cancel and OK buttons are always in the same order, the Quit option is in the same place for every app, the Enter and Escape keys do the same thing on every dialog box. These are Good Things because even experienced users do not want surprises or a treasure hunt when using new software, and having to remember different UI minutiae for every app is unproductive and inefficient.

The lack of good and consistent HIG is a huge problem with Linux. GTK, QT, etc. all have different UI guidelines, not to mention that most devs do whatever they feel like anyway. It makes using the Linux Desktop a less pleasant experience for most novice and experienced users.

He was going to use sparklines, but he was afraid of getting sued for a patent violation.

At my old place of employment, the department that the programmers were in was called R&D, which is much more descriptive since we actually built the product the they sold (much like the OP's situation). If you are a programmer in an enterprise programming support apps like DB frontends, maybe lumping programmers into IT makes sense since they support the rest of the organization. But if the company's product is software, being an "IT guy" is not just insulting and inaccurate, is is probably is indicative of a problem with that company's culture. The people that make the stuff you sell should not be lumped together with the people that fix the secretary's computer.

You are out of your mind with the request to be able to install any OS you want--because no free OS is going to meet the rest of your criteria or even work on most phones. If you get rid of that fantasy, the Blackberry Tour matches all the other criteria. You can freely install other versions of Blackberry OS, including the many leaks of development versions that are available, assuming they are compatible with the hardware. The browser isn't the greatest, but it is functional, and there are third-party browsers that are pretty good.

Yea, the Awesome Bar is decidedly less awesome when it is really slow. Try the Vacuum Places add-on, it defragments the Awesome Bar's database and makes it nice and responsive again.

The real WTF is why there is no built-in way to do this.

Ok, so if I have to push a button to update it, it's not covered? If I don't embed it but, say, just have an external application retrieve data from a spreadsheet, it's not covered?

Probably, to both. Most patents, by the time they are approved, have been whittled down to this level. And although I am not in favor of many software patents, most are not really that bad because they describe very specific implementations.

We have a saying in the Jewish community specifically about German crimes committed in the past: "Never Forget."