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mitoXD — Deskspaces II
#archlinux #screenshot #xfce #xmonad #tilingwm #polybar #customization
Published: 2019-10-05 22:30:57 +0000 UTC; Views: 3797; Favourites: 24; Downloads: 0
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Description
- Best viewed maximized on a laptop or desktop screen!
2.1 The Screens
2.2 The (Multi-)Status Bar
2.3 The Theming
2.4 XMonad Features
2.5 Against all odds
- OS: Arch Linux
- Kernel: 5.3.1-ARCH, 32 Bit (pentium4, single core)
- WM/DE: XMonad 0.15 w/ XFCE 4.14
- screen res: 1024 × 768 px (single monitor)
- X compositor: compton
- running apps: xfce4-panel, polybar, dzen2, xmobar, xfce4-terminal, xed, neofetch, pywal, Gimp, Thunar, Firefox and others
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2. What’s this all about …
Though this collection of screenshots seems like a reprise of Deskspaces , the resources give the distinction to it! So now I wanted to use my own works for the wallpapers, for example. They also should turn my lately revived IBM Thinkpad into a visual little treasure chest! For running brand new software on that old machine, I chose Arch Linux 32 .
2.1 The Screens
Now by the first two rows, we see here the shots how all of the ten empty workspaces look like, beginning from top left. And that’s an advantage of xfce4-desktop: It allows individual wallpapers and a gradient. Together with the centered background images the desktops appear as if they were pictures or objects hanging at or embedded into a wall, while background colors or gradients may or may not correspond to the ’foreground' GTK coloring. – These images are derived from my own photographs per workspace as follows:
Some of them have been altered. I especially liked to give my favorite “Talisman” on ws 10 a touch of frozen glass. – However, the screens themselves differ from the assemblage above as on the old laptop’s TFT they have got another calibration, physical resolution, brightness, and some kind of cozy retro glow from the lower edge. I enjoy looking at the box either if it's is idle or just playing music or radio streams.
2.2 The (Multi-)Status BarThere’s a double lined continuous status bar at the top, containing a left, center, and right part for displaying various information such as the running mpd and focused window client, system stats, date, time, and basic local weather data. For easier access, I placed the desktop pager in the middle, surrounded by the desktop menu on the left and the systray (a.k.a. notification area) on the right – which are managed by two xfce4-panels being placed by an exact x/y pixel offset. By this means everything is in reach by mouse click as well as hotkeys.
Further the info bar’s composition is rather complex; namely it consists of up to three layers! – Though frankly speaking any kind of status bar could serve its purpose, according to my knowledge the unique thing polybar can do is round corners. Therefor I use also two instances of it, stacked one upon the other, for the main layer. When getting pulseaudio to work, configuring the “volume” and “mpd” modules (upper left) is quite easy, as it’s for “xwindow” (lower left), “date” and “time” (on the right). Next, you have to set up all multiple i18n and symbol fonts, along with their vertical offset for fine tuning. However, I still prefer my well-proven self-made dzen/conky-cli/Bash script system and weather bars, and embedded them into polybar as custom modules, positioned at their own coordinates. – Not everything has been made clickable yet, and maybe I’m going to provide some more info (stock indexes, available package updates, a kind of biff or whatever), but I like it so far.
Anyway, I'd like the different info bars to appear as one. And since there's compton, all of them would appear with their individual shadows and unrevealed shapes. As a consequence, the shadows for polybar, dzen2, and xfce4-panel are disabled. But to gain a spatial illusion, I created a base level xmobar that nearly fits the extent of the polybars just for spreading the shadow. – The trickiest thing however is to make sure all bars are showing up in right order, without covering each other; so my start-up scriptlet includes a forced restart of the nasty xfce4-panel and a couple of sleeps!
2.3 The ThemingWhen playing with the Enlightenment DE before, I liked its neat style, so I chose the “E17gtk” theme for skinning all GUI apps; as a side-effect, it also resembles Arch’s branding color palette blue–white–gray–black; see row #3, shot 1, 2 & 5. – And so does again “Talisman” in a way, at least by what terminal color table (py)wal made of it, as displayed by neofetch in row #3, shot 3. As a contrast, I set the flat monochrome “Archdroid-ArchBlue” icon theme and the semi-transparent “Flatbed Cursors - Orange”. – Besides, I had to manually edit ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css for changing the color of unfocused workspaces in the pager and unfocused client tab labels from “white” to “gray”.
2.4 XMonad FeaturesThe advantage of a tiling window manager is (a) enhancing the workflow by optimally arranging the window clients using all available desktop space, and (b) quick navigation by keyboard. – XMonad as my favorite WM can easily be extended for mouse support, too! So optionally I can e.g. navigate workspaces or drag the size floating clients by mouse as well, if I want. Applications can be automatically send to specific workspaces, see the code snippet in row #3, shot 2. Yet XMonad comes with a set of default layouts, functions and hotkeys, but at least I always want to add other ones for some more action, spawning, and customizing into my own xmonad.hs! Last but not least there are gimmicks such as a dmenu-like starter prompt (shot 4) and GridSelect (shot 5) for evoking programs or navigating currently running clients, respectively. – Overall, other tiling WMs for X come and go, proclaiming new features and easy configuration, but I wonder if I would ever leave XMonad for good, as it works perfectly for my needs and never crashes! 2.5 Against all oddsBut to no avail: Due to severe yet unresolved problems related to the machines keyboard and X.org and/or libinput drivers leading to sudden desktop freezes, when pressing both certain special as well as arbitrary keys, eventually the complete graphical system turned out to be unusable! The symptoms neither could have been clearly identified nor circumvented. – And that's a pity; though this is a rather limited spare box which can be lagging as hell, it seemed a reliable fallback, and I occasionally use it for testing and love also working on it. But without a GUI I would be left to console usage `only.' So I was sure to look for alternatives and recover it one day – which I did!
Further, there’s a wide choice of potential tiling layouts, also configurable per workspace. But since my screen is only 1024×768 px, I just prefer “Full”, “Tabbed”, and “Mirror tiled”, which can all be cycled. Using the latter, I set a decent gap of smartSpacing = 2 pixels, which disappears when the layout changes. And there’s only a tab decoration as shown in row #3, shot 1, when there are two or more window clients sharing the same ws. Accordingly, having XMonad.Layout.NoBorders properly imported and configured, window borders vanish around single or full screen clients.
My keyboard is missing the “Windows key”, so I use
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3. Links and References
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.: ⟨ previous deviation :: { Crispy Arch Linux Pr0n } :: next deviation ⟩ :.
Comments welcome!
