141–150 of 215 posts
It looks like suckless tools work on X. I recently made the switch to Wayland and was wondering if a similar set of tools (with this minimalist philosophy) exist. Any idea?
250 lines of Rust should get you started
wayst in code refers to having gotten https://github.com/michaelforney/st to work at some point, seems there's also https://github.com/majestrate/wterm
This post highlights many of the reasons why I’ve chosen to just stick with a standard, widely-used desktop OS (macOS in my case, but could easily be Windows or some other OS like Fedora), and use almost all the default settings, adapting to the defaults over the years. Would the tiny incremental gain from tweaking one or two specific settings to my perfect liking save me anywhere near the amount of time, happiness,…
> I don’t have enough time in my life to debug and recompile my window manager or Terminal app on a regular basis. Maybe a long time ago, when I was single and had a lot more time to burn. I set up dwm, st, and dmenu once years ago, and have worked flawlessly without faults ever since. I actually use a stripped-down hacked-up dwm that I did on a Sunday years ago and have since lost the source for it; I can't recompil…
Unless that was the first time you used those tools, how long prior to that did you spend getting to a state where you could do that?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yesterday I posted something about an emacs keybinding and someone pointed out that the command actually doesn't have a default keybinding. I set up that keybinding sometime in the mid 2000's and it hasn't changed since then. Since 2005 home many times have the defaults change in Windows/OSX/Gnome/KDE? (A lot! Gnome3, Plasma, Windows 8) It's something you do once and then leave alone. If someone is tweaking their con…
When new developments are made in computer graphics technology or UX research, I want to be able to take advantage of them. I don't want to limit myself to a design based on the state of the art in 2006 just to avoid having to learn anything new.
I mean I'm not against new and better ways to interact with a computer, I just like to decide on my own if I want to use the new and shiny thing or not. Fuzzy searching is probably the most significant improvement I opted in in the last couple of years, and it's used basically everywhere on my desktop, while all the "modern" desktop systems like GNOME, Windows 10, macOS, ... still barely make any use of it and their search implementations sometimes even worsened from my point of view (Windows 10).
This post highlights many of the reasons why I’ve chosen to just stick with a standard, widely-used desktop OS (macOS in my case, but could easily be Windows or some other OS like Fedora), and use almost all the default settings, adapting to the defaults over the years. Would the tiny incremental gain from tweaking one or two specific settings to my perfect liking save me anywhere near the amount of time, happiness,…
This post highlights many of the reasons why I’ve chosen to just stick with a standard, widely-used desktop OS (macOS in my case, but could easily be Windows or some other OS like Fedora), and use almost all the default settings, adapting to the defaults over the years. Would the tiny incremental gain from tweaking one or two specific settings to my perfect liking save me anywhere near the amount of time, happiness,…
This is the very reason I choose to configure a minimal WM, fed up of the churn and quirky behaviour of large DEs, especially the proprietary ones.
If you install DWM, or i3wm or {minimal wm of your choice}, you don't have to configure it to the nth degree like on unixporn - many of them work out of the box with sensible defaults (i3wm is known for this)... but the nicest thing of all? it stays that way, you may or may not make gradual tweeks over the years if you find a pain point, then when you reinstall or upgrade your system just take a single config file with you - done.
Compare this to macOS or windows where things just dynamically move around and change their behavior "because progress", or you re-install and have to dig through UIs to turn shit off to get back to where you were... I don't want this, I want to get shit done, I also don't want to have to relearn someone's exciting new desktop paradigm every few months at random and inconvenient times, which these days are more and more catered to the lowest common denominator of user.
Using a minimal WM does not necessitate massive time investment, it may take a little getting used to like any new thing, you can invest as much or little into customisation as you can be bothered - the biggest reward: stability, continuity, piece of mind, sanity, less distraction.
Anecdote: I last touched my i3config 4 years ago, my WM behaves the same, I use the same key commands, no new features are automatically injected on updates... zero distraction.
This post highlights many of the reasons why I’ve chosen to just stick with a standard, widely-used desktop OS (macOS in my case, but could easily be Windows or some other OS like Fedora), and use almost all the default settings, adapting to the defaults over the years. Would the tiny incremental gain from tweaking one or two specific settings to my perfect liking save me anywhere near the amount of time, happiness,…
But then I found "Regolith". There are a few distributions which have i3 out of the box, but this one had a special keybinding reminder that was one click (or keybinding) away. I was very surprised by how quickly I adapted once the barrier of entry was removed.
Once I switched funny things started happening. I wanted to slightly change the time format of the bar, and found that it was controlled by a tiny shell script. So I made my own tiny shell script that did exactly what I wanted. Eventually this sort of thing happened at lower and lower levels and I started hacking the C code and making PRs. It was really strange that the barrier between my window manager and it's code is smaller than the one between my previous desktop environment (xfce) and the new window manager. It's liberating.
All this said, when I had to use OSX at a previous company, the walled garden was pretty nice. It always worked and the usability was much better than most other environments I had used. But now that I've experienced something custom built to my preferences, I would have a hard time using something else.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This comment strikes home. The "bug-space" is so much smaller, and definitely possible for a lone newcomer to grasp in a day or two
A window manager may be only 2000 lines of source code but it implements a host of formal and informal standards and interacts with hundreds of other programs on my computer. You may need only a day or two to orient yourself to the source code, but that’s on top of months or years of experience with X11R6 and ICCCMv2 and EWMH and such. How much debugging did you first need to do to discover your current issue was eve…
Dwm "wins" by just giving up, in a sense. It doesn't try to implement a taskbar, therefore it cannot have a buggy taskbar.
EDIT: I guess it does have a "Taskbar", but in a very, very limited scope.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When new developments are made in computer graphics technology or UX research, I want to be able to take advantage of them. I don't want to limit myself to a design based on the state of the art in 2006 just to avoid having to learn anything new.
What's some of the latest and greatest UX research someone might miss out on when they don't use some of the modern desktop systems? I mean I'm not against new and better ways to interact with a computer, I just like to decide on my own if I want to use the new and shiny thing or not. Fuzzy searching is probably the most significant improvement I opted in in the last couple of years, and it's used basically everywher…
This post highlights many of the reasons why I’ve chosen to just stick with a standard, widely-used desktop OS (macOS in my case, but could easily be Windows or some other OS like Fedora), and use almost all the default settings, adapting to the defaults over the years. Would the tiny incremental gain from tweaking one or two specific settings to my perfect liking save me anywhere near the amount of time, happiness,…
Yeah, the closer I can get to just opening Visual Studio and pressing F5 the happier I am. I like to focus on writing software and shipping a product, not troubleshooting toolchains and figuring out config files for each piece involved. I know not everyone feels this way.
And since you can’t even look at the CSPROJ within VS without gymnastics debugging isn’t even easy to get started with.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In what way are they combative or unpleasant? I've never experienced this. I enjoy the philosophy and opinionated approach they have to development. I setup an old thinkpad with openbsd and dwm and st and it all worked great and i learned some C along the way. I also used sent - their plaintext slide presentation tool to give a talk at work and it was a pretty cool way to put a presentation together quickly and focus…
There was a tweet about Nazi stuff: https://twitter.com/pid_eins/status/1113738764797534208?s=19 See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20845633 I don't know much more about the community, I don't like suckless tools.