💾 Archived View for lark.gay › posts › customizing-linux-again.gmi captured on 2024-05-26 at 14:39:02. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-03-21)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Back around 2015-2017 I was a typical Arch Linux user running i3 and having a great time as long as I didn't need to do silly things like use a printer or plug in an external display.
Then I started school and decided having a laptop that works reliably might be important, so I switched to Gnome on Ubuntu.
But I did enjoy playing with dotfiles and reading documentation and writing little scripts to make my computing experience more ergonomic and aesthetic.
Recently I learned about this desktop environment called Regolith that runs the Sway window manager inside a Gnome session, giving you a tiling window manager with some of the conveniences of Gnome. So I started playing around with it, and now I'm remembering why I used to love hacking at my desktop environment so much.
The Regolith Desktop Environment
It started with just changing some colors and rebinding some keys. Eventually I replaced the default status bar with Waybar and got knee-deep in GTK CSS. Then I'm writing scripts and systemd services. Now I'm thinking of forking some of the upstream tools or writing my own. And so it goes.
What I love most about this hobby is that the community has built a huge library of small, composable tools that can be scripted to do all manner of cool stuff. Like I implemented a keyboard-based emoji selector in a single line of Bash by piping a JSON dump of the Unicode emoji database through `jq` and into a dmenu-like tool. I added a notifications counter to my statusbar by writing a 15-line Python script that queries the notifications daemon over its IPC socket. I added a blur effect to my lockscreen by writing a Bash script that takes a screenshot, applies the blur effect to it, and sets it as my lockscreen background. Cool stuff like that.
This page has a pretty huge list of those kinds of tools:
I especially like that you can get into doing this kind of customization without much of any programming knowledge. It's still a very technical and esoteric hobby, but not needing that specific skill at least lowers the bar to entry ever so slightly. It's also easy to copy scripts other folks have written; it's very common for people to keep their dotfiles in a public git repo for exactly that purpose.
Now I'm starting to get deeper down the rabbit hole and thinking about building some of my own tools. Over the weekend I started experimenting with Iced, a graphical toolkit for Rust. I want to see if I can build a little Gnome-style window switcher for myself.
This little hobby has been a nice way to occupy my time over the past few weeks. It's especially nice rediscovering something that was once a huge special interest of mine, but this time with the skills and experience to do even cooler stuff with it. I'm excited to see what I end up building!
─────────