The arrival of my
new workstation
saw the culmination of a 2 year quest to (drastically) improve my
desktop environment. Machine came pre-installed with Ubuntu
and LUKS which I disposed of, and installed the best
desktop/workstation OS available at the
moment, Arch Linux. Its
solid UNIX fundations, its philosophy and package management,
deserve an article in its own right so that is all I'll say about it
now. Once the OS was installed I cloned
my dotfiles.git
repository and was ready to go. During these past few years I wrote
about various software I use every day, but to see these components
work in unison, to see the interaction and the big picture, is what
matters to me most.
Following the order of
my awesome
tag layout is a good path through my workspace. But first to
mention Zenburn,
a color scheme I discovered a few years ago, which now plays a very
important role. Just about everything on my desktop follows the
schemes guidelines, everything but GTK and QT widgets. Zenburn is easy
on my eyes and saved me a lot of headaches.
First tag is "term" where my terminals reside, Zenburn themed
urxvt and screen connecting me to the outside world. An SSH client and
Irssi are often found there. Long lasting sessions are always
on that tag, but for quick terminal jobs
the scratch
module provides me with disposable terminals that slide-in or
pop-up. While working, awesome's fair layout ensures each
terminal gets an equal part of the screen, and one that requires my
total attention I often maximize.
Next tag is "emacs", probably the most important tag, where I
code, write and take notes. The
Emacs org-mode
plays a crucial role, I use its format for notes, documentation,
keeping track of projects and working hours, auth credentials,
personal agenda and much more. I do
use eCryptfs,
but every sensitive file is also GPG encrypted with some help
of Emacs epa-mode. Which brings me to the GPG agent which I
mentioned in
many previous
articles. Every time Emacs needs my key a PIN entry dialog will
appear, every time I open a new SSH session a dialog will appear to
unlock that key. I have dozens of crypto keys but it's easy to keep
track of them in this manner.
Next tag is "web" with Firefox
and vimperator
that changed my browsing drastically. Once I wrote about connecting
awesome with org-mode, and this is the tag where I utilize
that connection the most. The Mod4+q key-binding spawns a
little
remember
frame for taking a note, or automatically pasting the clipboard
selection. I store huge amounts of web data in this way. Another very
important connection is passing text field contents to Emacs, for
editing. I use it almost exclusively for managing support tickets,
once the ticket is opened in Emacs
the post-mode
is invoked.
Speaking of e-mail, the "mail" tag comes next. The realm of
Alpine and awesome's magnifier layout. Most of the
time there are two instances running, one personal and one connected
to the company's IMAP server. By the way Alpine handles a
500k mailbox with ease, and only days ago I heard
a Thunderbird user complain it couldn't handle just 60. Where
would I be without it, I can't imagine. Every time a new mail comes in
the tag turns red, because of the urgent flag, one key press and the
client which triggered the event is automatically focused. Since I
use Topal
this tag too spawns a lot of PIN entry dialogs.
My fifth tag is reserved for IM, where Gajim was used almost
exclusively until I
needed OTR encryption on
a daily basis. Now I run Pidgin, and I was very surprised
that it took very little effort to make it look and behave exactly
like Gajim. I spend a lot of time on this tag and it was very
important to
have zenburn
in pidgin, otherwise all other efforts would be useless. The
following tag, "rss", was very important while I was
freelancing. Akregator would fetch the new projects feed
every 5 minutes and often that responsiveness alone would land
jobs. Last tag is "media", a floating layout tag
with smplayer, utorrent, ROX, Okular... mostly for
multimedia, and for reading.