Posting about guitars, linux, bicycles, and lgbtq+ stuff. politics are somewhere on the bottom left.
this is the way
xubuntu. stable and apps are reasonably up to date. i'll probably switch to mint with the whole snaps thing though. fedora is the one distro i never tried in my distro hopping phase though so...
yeah i had an emoji selector for rofi, it was super useful. the problem with emoji selectors is on some sites they're really easy to use, and on some they are terrible or non-existent, so it's much better to have a universal menu. only problem was that i just could not train my brain to use the universal menu rather than clicking the face on the box i was writing in. i must revisit this.
this is what i'm talking about too. i have a similar scripts folder and honestly i can't remember half the stuff that's in there ha.
this is something i come across sometimes - an application can be designed to do one thing i need, and do it well, but another application, which was designed to do something completely different, actually does the thing i need more conveniently, and does it well enough to work.
ahh i like that one. i don't really game any more but there are a bunch of old mmos where i could have made good use of this.
ahh good to know that wayland has a dotool in case i ever end up on a distro that uses it. i'm so scared of leaving x.
a fun post. what are your favourite hacks that you've found or created for extremely unique use cases?
right, so as the title suggests...
i like linux based OSes because you can pretty much mould your operating system to the shape of your brain. i call it cognitive ergonomy. and i'd like it to catch on. even on a relatively play-it-safe distro like the one i'm currently using, the repos are full of handy little applications to make life immeasurably easier for you, if they aren't installed already. thanks to xdotool, xdo, wmctrl, and sxhkd, pretty much any action can easily be bound to a shortcut key. for eg, i have xdotool search --name vimnote windowactivate || kitty --title=vimnote nvim -c "norm 13j" ~/notes/index.md bound to mod+n. it's so simple, and i was so proud of myself when i got it to work (i'm not really a scripty person). i just wanted to make something easy. then i wanted to make it a bit easier. then i was feeling like "idk this is still way too many key presses" so i found a way of making it even easier.
i've got a bunch of little hacks like this. before i found qmmp, i set up global keys for mpv so i could listen to podcasts on another workspace. i have ranger set up to give specific info from mediainfo as a preview for audio and video files. (which windows does easily in gui file browser but THAT'S NOT THE POINT OK)
anyway, the ubuntu forums and arch wiki are full of tricks that a lot of people want to set up, i'm curious as to the ones you had to set up for yourself.
yeah i just read this post header, carried on scrolling, clicked another, and got sent to a sports post. i wouldn't mind knowing how this bug can manifest itself in such an oddly specific way, but only if it can be done in say, a character limit of 300-500 characters.
nice i like that bg, you can get lost in the detail but it wouldn't be too intrusive in the background of a transparent terminal window. the best rices are the ones that don't eschew function when chasing form.
EDIT: i better be less subtle when hinting that i'd really like to have that wall paper
easy motion was the first one i looked at and honestly i'm scared to look at the others in case i fall down yet another rabbit hole.
well, i eschewed motion plugins for so long, but i recently installed easy motion, to quote "maybe use it minimally so i don't have to change my work flow too much". i pretty much gave up using w, e, b and f within a day of installing it, replacing each of them with a more efficient reach for the same number of key presses. similar situation with ultisnips, thinking it'd be overkill for my needs. in other words i was worried it would save me TOO MUCH time pffft. these both work really well with opening zsh commands in $editor too.
according to the site, 2ghz cpu and 4gb ram is recommended. if you're running lower specs than that i'd probably suggest something with xfce, which will be less demanding but still look and feel relatively modern. some good (imo) xfce distros are xubuntu, linux mint xfce, or peppermint, if you need a 32 bit iso.
i'm currently using xubuntu on a thinkpad t430 with 3ghz i5 cpu and 4gb of ram and it runs really well.
apologies, given how the term "skeptic" has been mangled in general i really should have done that in the first post. https://www.merseysideskeptics.org.uk/podcasts/skeptics-with-a-k
loosely based, but skeptics with a k. two of the hosts have autism and i loved the show before, but they really helped me make sense of my own head and sort of gave me a direction to work in. the show is interesting, they're a good bunch, the sound levels are rarely short of perfect and the episode descriptions are very helpful for cherry picking. there's maybe two episodes where they spend a lot of time on their own autism, but it does come up regularly.
EDIT: https://www.merseysideskeptics.org.uk/podcasts/skeptics-with-a-k
this run on xubuntu i think. when i first switched to mint (xfce) a few years back i'd reinstall every month or so because i broke something, yes with enough misguided tinkering linux mint can be broken. then i'd spend a week-month on other distros, mx linux, peppermint, all the ubuntus, then manjaro that got me on to minimal installs, then arch btw, then endeavour, with my own awesome or openbox config. i thought i'd settled down for 6 months or so, but the threat of a bad package was always there (even though it never happened). when i got my latest laptop i installed mint again, with my openbox config. after a while i started noticing things weren't running quite right, so i just thought "instead of changing everything, just change what i need to" and went with xub for slightly more up to date repos. turns out i can get pretty much all the functionality i had with openbox out of xfce. so i've managed to stay on one install for about 18 months!
Is there anything like vim-ultisnips that i can use in the terminal (zsh)
like the title says, i've been trying to replicate the snippet functionality of vim ultisnips, so i can expand "fn" into find ./ '*$1* , and then at $1 i can type "or" to expand to find ./ \( -name '*$1*' -o -name '*$2*' $3 \) $4. if i need to add a third pattern to that i can add onm at $4 to expand into -o -name '*$1*' $2 where i can add yet another onm at $2, or "! or" to add a bunch of patterns i can exclude. i have a bunch of these set up in neovim, for a bunch of commands, and they save me so much time, but when it comes to writing them in the terminal it feels like i'm typing in porridge.
i know i can open the current line in $EDITOR, and this is super useful, but it still breaks my flow more than i'd like, and unless the command is particularly long and awkward it's easier just to bash it out like a caveman.
there's also a tool called "pet", but despite going over the github page a few times, i can't work out whether it will offer the ability to nest snippets like this. it seems like it's just a glorified version of the functions i can set in my zshrc, where i'd need to write all the various combinations of the find command (for eg), rather than the flexibility of ultisnips. if you use pet and can confirm that it does this, then consider the thread closed ha.
sorry for the long post. i'm not really a codey scripty person, i'm just somebody who installed linux mint a few years back and realised that the command line is sort of really cognitively ergonomic (most of the time).
one that might play better in northern england for me - an ironic "let's 'av it". not the full on "LET'S 'AV ITTTTTTTTTTT woo" just a dead pan 'right, let's 'av it, eh?'
manjaro was my way in to arch. i used the fully configured xfce version, then several versions of the minimal install until i got something i liked, and didn't break after a couple of weeks.
if you were to ask me for a recommendation on an arch based distro i'd say endeavour, but manjaro is perfectly fine.
ahh thanks, i was wondering just how "minimal" minimal was. i was expecting something like endeavour - a configured OS but around 1500 packages. so i really appreciate that warning haha. ok better start making my list.
i hopped from arch/wm to xub too. tbh everything i learned from setting up awesome, qtile, open box etc helped me get really into the functionality of xfwm and make it really work for me. it's a little sluggish, but only compared to a completely bare bones wm. the distro hopping phase was a valuable learning experience, but i think this is a perfectly fine place to settle down.
i've been curious about the minimal edition. now that i've found replacements and workarounds in the ubuntu repos, i've been wanted to do a fresh install with that. i've got ~3100 packages just from trying stuff out and forgetting to uninstall it haha.
yeah that one annoyed me especially as the only reason netflix ever made money was because they won the war of convenience against torrent sites.
my expectations weren't very high, given how the twitter exodus played out, seeing some of the people who made very bold statements about never coming back... coming back... and subscribing to twitter blue.
you're never going to take down a giant like reddit, or twitter, or facebook, or whatever, in one swift blow. they're probably going to get through this. and your average social media user doesn't want to bring down the status quo, they just want to look at funny pictures of dogs. and that's fine. the real victory to be had is showing people that things can be done differently. enough people will stay on fedi servers to keep a community going, and by the time the next bunch of disgruntled posters come along there will be more content to keep them engaged
the laptop next door.
I know i've let this get a bit messy but eh it's a new community for me so I'm letting my hair down and posting some unix porn.
Look in the top left, I've bound workspaces to asdzxc. Cool eh? I wish tiling window managers did that. Can't have split keyboards on a laptop.