My preferred Unix environment

I use WindowMaker as my X11 window manager, to which I add gnome-panel (for power and volume management, application integration, and quick access to administrative tools). I use a lot of shell scripts to genericise launching of some applications in order to make it easy to switch preferred applications that are suitably generic without editing a number of scripts.

OS/Distro: RedHat Fedora Linux - It's a fairly nonconservative form of a fairly conservative distribution (RHEL), which I wouldn't hesitate to install on a server or a desktop.
IM: Pidgin - I find the attitude of the Pidgin developers irritating, but their software remains the best IM client I've used so far.
Browser: Firefox or Links, depending on intent - For most browsing I use firefox, but it's sometimes handy to have a faster browser that doesn't share my main cookies and can show me the source with a quick keystroke
Editor: vim - I've switched back and forth between emacs and vim many times, but I lost my original .emacs (which was very large and wonderful) many years ago, so I've stuck with vim. It's faster anyhow, and it's much deeper than my usage of it is.
Terminal: gnome-terminal. I used rxvt for several years, but gnome-terminal has better handling of unicode and fonts, and with enough tweaking of settings it's ok.
Clock: wmCalClock - integrates nicely with WindowMaker, looks nice, running several instances of it to keep track of different time zones is simple.
File Browser: nautilus - Although I almost never use applications of this type...
Word Processor: Openoffice or abiword - Although I almost never use applications of this type. More often I write text or HTML docs in vim.
Spreadsheet: gnumeric - Fast, pleasant, lightweight
Email: PSMail - I wrote it.
Multimedia: mplayer with a CLI wrapper I wrote to handle "playlist"-type functionality
Database: PostgreSQL - I have several of these for various things
Wiki: MediaWiki, POUND - Useful for keeping track of things. Eventually I'll just use POUND because I wrote it.

Dotfiles and other Miscellany