Lately I have decided to change a bunch of stuff when it comes to my workflow with my devices. Be it my laptop or my android phone. I have made some changes mostly out of boredom, but also because I have got a few problems that I didn’t feel like fixing on Spectrwm, as well as other quality of life changes.
🪟 Leaving Spectrwm, embracing Awesome, considering DWM
I really, really liked Spectrwm, I might as well go back to it in a few days, since the main reason I am moving away from it might not be that hard to fix. I find the system tray to be quite useful to me, my choice was trayer, since it was good enough. However, I had some problems that made it feel pretty clunky.
- I can only show tag numbers,or numbers + name. I want to display only the names, which are Nerd Font glyphs.
- The systray will overlap with the bar content, at least on the position I want it to be.
- The systray wont follow me when switching workspace, but I have a script that moves it using
wmctrl - When trayer gets moved to my current workspace, it steals focus, if I close every window, it steals focus
- If trayer gets mouse focus, I cannot do anything, no keybindings will work. The only thing that works is clicking an icon that opens a window (like Discord) or killing Spectrwm from a TTY
Honestly, most of these problems are not a big deal most of the time. But as I said, I am doing this mainly out of boredom, so let me be.
Installing dwm also came to mind, and I decided to give it a try, but right now I can’t wrap my head around it, but I might check it out later.
🌐 Changing Firefox, checking out Qutebrowser
For quite some time, I have heard good things about Qutebrowser. So I have decided to give it a try. I actually loved it, I really liked the way it works and I found myself extremely comfortable using Vim keybindings on it. I really enjoyed how smooth it was and the keyboard driven workflow.
Its engine is now based on Chromium, which is a bit annoying since I support Firefox’s Gecko. However it now will display most websites better than when it was using WebKit as a base.
So right now I decided to go back to Firefox, and set it up in a similar manner to HexDSL’s configuration, which has tabs on the left side and gets rid of most of the GUI, making it pretty nice looking to me. I will change to Qutebrowser once I set it up properly and get ad-blocking on it.
For now, Firefox + VimVixen will do to give me that Vim-like workflow. I actually can’t believe how handy and nice it is.
💻 Maybe distro hopping, changing rom again
After all this, I have also been thinking about changing my distro once again. I have enjoyed void for quite a while, and its great, with no doubt, I might just be a bit inspired while writing this and I might end up not switching after all.
I have been considering something like EndeavourOS, or maybe reinstalling Void, but base only, we will see. I am a bit tempted by the “terminal driven” workflow the claim to have, I already have that on Void, but I am still curious.
Also, I will change my Android rom soon. I haven’t updated it in a while, and I have been looking for a bit more customization than what I already have. I have downloaded CrDroid, which has an official rom available for my Redmi Note 8, so I will give it a try later today.
Syncthing and Migrate are great tools for making backups, and I think I will have to install minimal Gapps due to school stuff, and because I got some paid apps I can’t live without, such as Nova Launcher or Typing Hero. I am working towards changing that, but not right now.
I always feel quite dirty when I have to change rom and reinstall the Google apps, especially when I try to defend FOSS and Android in general, but well, you gotta do what you gotta do.
Wrapping up
Anyways, after all of this I gotta say I am quite happy with the changes I’ve done, and I hope the ones I still have to make will be good too. I have had some problems with time management, and I know that it’s kind of a meme the amount of time you invest on setting everything up on Linux to get actual work done. But well, I enjoy it, and I still managed to deliver all of my homework! So I consider this a win. I have exams next week, so let’s see what happens with that.
This has been day 34 of #100DaystoOffload