Since I spend most of my working hours at my computer, I might as well share what tools help me to put that time to good use. First thing’s first: I work on a MacBook Pro 15” laptop and I run Mac OS X Leopard that came with it. In parallel, I run Ubuntu (the latest release), for most computational stuff due to weird compatibility problems between GCC, Python and the rest when run under Leopard.
That being said, here’s a list of programs that I choose to use.
- Text processing: LaTeX
- LaTeX IDE: Emacs + AUCTeX + RefTeX
- Presentations: LaTeX + beamer
- Reading PDFs: Skim
- Sci. papers archive: Papers
- Browser: Firefox
- E-mail:
- Programming IDE: Emacs+ YASnippet
- Plain-vanilla editor: Emacs
- Terminal: Apple Terminal, Gnome Terminal, Emacs Eshell
- R&R: iDistract + Internet full of Flash games
- Version Control: Mercurial
Useful FREE/open source research programs/libraries/tools:
- Numpy+Scipy: Python infused with Matlab power. A bit bad on the documentation side, but very useful.
- Trilinos: A compilation of numeric algorithms with serial and parallel implementations. Comes with PyTrilinos, Python extensions.
- VFGEN: Converter from XML to various vector field representation. Construct your v.f. once, run it in Matlab, Octave, DSTool, Scipy… GLORIOUS. (VFGEN brought tears of joy to my eyes upon first encountering it.)
- PyDSTool: From the makers of DSTool, here comes a module that mirrors DSTools capabilities but in Python. Good for easy to use, yet fast, ODE integrators as ODEs are compiled in C and then called by integrators.
