A story telling to save me from a therapist consultation.

No space square world. I realize that that this could be my theme philosophy. This is my general approach:

  • windows manager: tiling (bspwm)with no spaces, squared windows, no decorations, no visual effects
  • theme: transparency and grey background buttons/white text

Over two decades I went from a fancy looking machine to its complete opposite where minimalism is king. How did I make such a big jump?
To make it brief, recreating this comfort look that invaded my real environment felt reassuring at first in my virtual life. But as time went by I noticed that smooth rounded stuff that transiently showed up on my screen created:

  • more and more distraction and negatively impacted my productivity
  • some frustration when something didn’t run as expected because I felt that everything should be as smooth as the appearance of my screen

I would definitely say that I feel way better now and I’m more efficient but I also admit that I’ve reached an extreme where:

  • I don’t appreciate screens over 14" anymore because I feel like it’s taxing on my eyes movement and again a waste of space
  • I don’t like wasting a pixel of space if not justified. This is also maybe influenced by preference for small screens
  • I need extreme simplicity (which brings efficiency) to all aspects of my workflow. So I use a 36-key split keyboard, a trackball, vim-like keybindings everywhere possible, use terminal as much as I can, use fzf for all my file searches…

Hope you will never end up like me but nice to have friends in this group if it’s too late for you ^^

  • rutrum@lm.paradisus.day
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    9 months ago

    Do you use a dock or bar? I find it hard to justify it these days. It tells me the time, thats about it.

    • www-gem@lemmy.mlOP
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      9 months ago

      That’s another thing I’ve changed as well. No bar or dock anymore. I use rofi and some home made scripts to:

      • show the date/time, disk space, free ram, bluetooth devices battery level, volume, and search bar (to launch a command or a search on internet)
      • manage the volume sinks and sources
      • manage the wifi and vpn
      • manage my passwords and automatically fill forms if I ask for it
      • manage my internet bookmarks
      • search my email contacts
      • manage the clipboard