So a few months back I asked about you guys os in c/asklemmy, so this time I wanna ask about your desktops you use on this same account.
(I use kde but plan to move to cinnamon I find kde buggy and gnome tracker3 randomly broke for no reason + themeing so yh idk if these happened to anybody)
these days Hyprland but previously i3.
i basically live in the terminal unless i’m playing games or in the browser. these days i use most apps full screen and switch between desktops, and i launch apps using wofi/rofi. this has all become very specialized over the past decade, and it almost has a “security by obscurity” effect where it’s not obvious how to do anything on my machines unless you have my muscle memory.
not that i necessarily recommend this approach generally, but i find value in mostly using a keyboard to control my machines and minimizing visual clutter. i don’t even have desktop icons or a wallpaper.
I’m still on i3 as it’s been convenient, but this:
this has all become very specialized over the past decade
resonates. I keep incrementally adding personal tweaks and hotkeys to my setup, and I have all my dotfiles in a repo so it’s persistent across installations.
One example was I made my headphone button pause/play videos with i3’s config:
bindsym XF86AudioPlay exec playerctl play-pause
But then I adopted a script to toggle mic mute on work Zoom meetings, so I combined it with the above - if I’m in a meeting it toggles mute, otherwise it play-pauses any current video. The script, for now:
#!/bin/bash
#
# Handler script for hitting mute on the headphone.
#
CURRENT_WINDOW=$(xdotool getwindowfocus)
# convoluted command to find the intersection of two searches
ZOOM_WINDOW=$(comm -12 \
<(xdotool search --name 'Meeting' | sort) \
<(xdotool search --class 'zoom' | sort))
if [[ -n "$ZOOM_WINDOW" ]]; then
# if zoom is active, toggle mic mute
xdotool windowactivate --sync ${ZOOM_WINDOW}
xdotool key --clearmodifiers "alt+a"
xdotool windowactivate --sync ${CURRENT_WINDOW}
else
# otherwise do play/pause
playerctl play-pause # will fail if no player found
fi
and of course I altered the i3 config to launch that script rather than playerctl directly.
[EDIT: Updated script as Zoom updated its window identities]
Another i3 user here. I slowly transitioned from KDE when switching keyboard layout stopped working as well as some other DE related things.
Ended up writing custom script for switching. Currently implemented with rofi in Perl, bc I like the syntax.
I still like having a bit nice gui, so i have wallpapers, some icons, etc. But I fell in love with terminal along with neovim : ) , soo kinda looking for that middle ground between look, performance and functionality.
Haven’t finished tweaking all the configs to my liking, but after that vanilla Arch is the direction I plan to go, since many things in my current install that I have as well as haven’t customized work a bit questionably or exist for no reason.
