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Every year ends pretty much the same way for me - I clean up my files, archive away my work projects from the past 18 or so months, and spend some time refreshing my desktop’s design to mix it up a little. As I’ve found a few real gems this month, I felt I should share them with my readers. I’ve put a headline above each item, so feel free to skim through and pick those that sound interesting to you.
Web Design Not too much going on here that I haven’t mentioned in separate articles throughout the year. That being said, I’m still just as excited about TailwindCSS, Gatsby, Hugo, and Docker as I was before.
Keyboard As I mentioned in an article earlier, I also moved to a split keyboard (the Redox) earlier in the year. After using it for a good few months now, I can’t imagine moving away from ortholinear keyboards ever again. That being said, I think I could be just as happy with a more normally-shaped ortholinear keyboard as well (such as a 60% or TKL). I also can’t imagine moving away from QMK firmware (or at least other firmware I can program). Gone are the days I wish a key were in a different location.
Programming I recently watched a keynote about Visual Studio Code (my code editor of choice these days), where they had a few good suggestions. They covered some aesthetic options, and also a few extensions. The main changes I’m actually using are the aesthetic options, which are as follows: • Fira Code (with Font Ligatures) - Fira Code is a wonderful monospaced font for programmers. However, the key difference is the support for font ligatures. This means that symbols like “⇒” become single glyphs, which is a godsend for legibility at times. I highly recommend looking at their GitHub page to see more details: github.com/tonsky/FiraCode. Using it is as simple as installing the font, adding it to Font Family in settings, and enabling Font Ligatures (found using the search, or under Text Editor settings).
• Color theme: City Lights. I actually like this theme so much that I’ve adapted it for use in my terminal as well. It’s a wonderful dark theme that uses colors with excellent contrast, and alleviates my complaints with most dark themes I’ve used so far (specifically there always seemed to be one color that was hard to read). • Icon theme: Material Icon Theme. It’s a little brighter and more multi-colored than I probably would have preferred, but the icons are very easy to differentiate and it supports a massive number of file types. This makes browsing through long lists of files to find the right one much simpler.
File Browser For a long time I used Nautilus, but switched to Thunar once Gnome 3 came out and some features disappeared. Then I switched to Nemo when it came out. After that, I felt like Nemo was fine, though I never felt terribly efficient getting around in it, and it occasionally had some issues with my settings in i3. I’ve always been fascinated by the CLI file managers (Ranger, Midnight Commander, etc.), but could never bring myself to get used to their interfaces or the muted colors. After adapting the City Lights color scheme to my terminal, however, I decided to give Ranger another shot. This ended up being a great plan, because I haven’t used anything else since. Sure, it takes a little getting used to with the vim-like keybindings and lack of a right-click menu, but once you start getting the hang of it, everything seems to be much more efficient. Gone are the days of my taking my hand off the keyboard to use the mouse when browsing files (nowadays I only use the mouse when browsing the web!). My recommendation for anyone who uses a tiling window manager or enjoys working in a terminal - find a good color scheme, and then try a CLI file manager out. Who knows? You might not look back.
Wallpapers My approach has almost always been to randomize my wallpapers on login - that way I experience a little bit of change day-to-day. After almost a full year of the last set of wallpapers (of which there were 8), I decided it was time to move away from my 4K HDR photography wallpapers, and look for something new. To which I discovered wallpaperscraft.com. After browsing through and selecting ultrawide resolutions, I found a good bunch of wallpapers that suited my needs (not too bright, even contrast (i.e. no washed out sections), and a style I found was calming). I downloaded a bunch of images, dumped them into a new folder, and adjusted my feh command to select from that wallpaper. Since then I’ve removed a few wallpapers for various reasons (blurry foreground in photography, or large watermarks I overlooked earlier, and in one case an image that made my semi-transparent terminal illegible). I also took the time to adjust my screensaver. It was previously i3-lock-fancy, which took a screenshot of my current workspace, blurred it, and set it as the background. It was a fancy effect, but more often than not took longer than I would have liked to process. Instead, I moved back to the basic i3-lock, and chose a few nice Go photos. After cutting various images to size, I ended up with one very nice image of a full-width Go board with shell stones.
Blender While this isn’t quite done yet (Version 2.8 is in beta), this is still something I’m very much looking forward to trying out. The main changes they seem to have made are user experience improvements, which has always been my main complaint with Blender. Now the left-click can select things, they’re using icons instead of words like “translate”, while still letting power users change and tweak their settings to what they’re used to. I don’t do a lot of work with 3D modelling, but I do enjoy it every once in a while, which was frustrating when it felt like every time I opened Blender I’d have to spend a good hour getting used to “their way” again. If anyone has had similar experiences, maybe give 2.8 a shot!
Cleaning Lastly, just a little bit of spring cleaning (yes, it was in December, but nonetheless). I took apart my NUC and cleaned all the hardware (including the fans). Gone is the scent of burning dust, the sound of fans at max speeds, and the uncomfortably warm air out of the exhaust. I usually clean my computers once a year, but with the NUC being as small as it is (and off the floor), I foolishly thought I could clean it less frequently. Let this be a lesson to anyone else who has a small computer on their desk! As always, I hope this article might have inspired at least a couple of you to try something new - even if it’s something as small as trying Fira Code. If you have any issues, corrections, or questions for me, you can reach me at lswest34+fcm@gmail.com.