An evening of linux on the desktop

published 2017-07-10

Last time, I wrote about trying a few desktop environments to see what's out there, keep things fresh, and keep me from complacency. Well, as with desktop environments, so with text editors. I decided briefly that I would try a few of the more recent code editors that are around these days. Lured in by their pleasing, modern visuals and their promises of a smooth, integrated experience, I've been meaning to give these a go for a while. Needless to say, as a long-time vim user, I just found myself frustrated that I wasn't able to get things done as efficiently in any of those editors as I could in vim ;) I tried installing vim keybindings in Atom but it just wasn't the same as a very limited set of functionality was there. As for the integrated environment, when you have tmux running by default, everything's integrated anyway.

And, as with editors, so once again with desktop environments. I've decided to retract my previous hasty promise and no longer to bother with trying any other environments; i3 is more than fine :)

However, I did spend some time this evening making things a bit prettier so here are some delicious configs for posterity:

Configs

Xresources

I've switched back to xterm from urxvt because, er... dunno.

Anyway, I set some nice colours for terminals and some magic stuff that makes man pages all colourful :)

XTerm*faceName: xft:Hack:regular:size=12
*termName: xterm-256color

! Colourful man pages
*VT100.colorBDMode:     true
*VT100.colorBD:         cyan
*VT100.colorULMode:     true
*VT100.colorUL:         darkcyan
*VT100.colorITMode:     true
*VT100.colorIT:         yellow
*VT100.veryBoldColors:  518

! terminal colours
*foreground:#CCCCCC
*background:#2B2D2E

!black darkgray
*color0:    #2B2D2E
*color8:    #808080
!darkred red
*color1:    #FF0044
*color9:    #F92672
!darkgreen green
*color2:    #82B414
*color10:   #A6E22E
!darkyellow yellow
*color3:    #FD971F
*color11:   #E6DB74
!darkblue blue
*color4:    #266C98
*color12:   #7070F0
!darkmagenta magenta
*color5:    #AC0CB1
*color13:   #D63AE1
!darkcyan cyan
*color6:    #AE81FF
*color14:   #66D9EF
!gray white
*color7:    #CCCCCC
*color15:   #F8F8F2

Vimrc

Nothing exciting here except for discovering a few options I hadn't previous known about:

" Show a marker at the 80th column to encourage nice code
set colorcolumn=80
highlight ColorColumn ctermbg=darkblue

" Scroll the text when we're 3 lines from the top or bottom
set so=3

" Use browser-style incremental search
set incsearch

" Override the default background colour in xoria256 to match the terminal background
highlight Normal ctermbg=black

" I like this theme
colorscheme xoria256

i3

I made a few colour tweaks to my i3 config so I get colours that match my new Xresources. One day, I might see if it's easy enough to have them both read colour definitions from the same place so I don't have to define things twice.

The result

Here's what it looks like: