October 23rd, 2009

Uzbl and Xmonad 

I already showed you that I switched from Firefox to Uzbl. Uzbl has no tabs out of the box, so I had to come up with something else. Somebody made a tabbing plug-in for Uzbl, but somebody else pointed me to the tabbing layout for XMonad. But I don’t want my browser full-screen. I have 22″ monitors with a resolution of 1680 * 1050 so full screen is a little much. Fortunately XMonad has something for that as well. namely the ComboP layout.

ComboP is a way to combine multiple layouts in one workspace. I now have a portion of the workspace tabbed so that is where I can have multiple uzbl windows. On the other portion I have two terminals. One for Weechat and one for Mutt. These are situated in a tall layout that doesn’t resize so they will always have 50% of the available vertical space.

This would be useless to have on every workspace, I just want it on the one I have reserved for my browsing. So I went to look for another module and found it. It’s called PerWorkspace. It gives you the ability to set a layout for just one workspace and to have just one layout on a workspace, and multiple on all the others. It does make your layoutHook look like a mess.

Here is my layoutHook line, don’t forget the imports!:

,layoutHook = avoidStruts $ onWorkspace "www" (named "Tabbed" (windowNavigation (combineTwo (TwoPane 0.03 0.5) (tabbed shrinkText tabConfig) (Mirror (tiled))))) $ tiled ||| named "HintedTall" (hintedTile XMonad.Layout.HintedTile.Tall) ||| noBorders Full

I think this is a great example of what Xmonad can do. You can mold and craft it into anything you want and it will do it for you. I just love my setup at the moment. If only there was a good cli-feed reader that could synchronize with Google Reader…

Category: Linux, Software, Window Managers, XMonad · Comments (3)
October 20th, 2009

New host, again 

I got a new hosting provider again. I went with a VPS, because I wanted some more freedom with what I can do on the server. I did take a control panel with it so can easily make accounts for people, and they can set them up using a web interface, I don’t see my mom logging into my server using ssh and moving some stuff around. This can be a little slow but there is more RAM on the way!

Category: ISP · Comments (0)
August 26th, 2009

August 2009 Screenshot 

A lot has happened in the past year, but not a lot different in the screenshot. It’s uzbl now, the rest is pretty much the same. I like it.

xmonad, uzbl, urxvt, dzen2, weechat, Vincent Kriek

Config Files

Category: Linux, Screenshots · Comments (3)
August 20th, 2009

Uzbl 

For those who remember, I’ve switched from Opera to Firefox a while ago. I like the way Firefox gives you the ability to extend the browser to your liking. But Firefox didn’t give me the right base. I want a simple browser that in itself does virtually nothing but browse and can be extended through plugins. And then Uzbl came around the corner.

Uzbl is a project that aims to be a browser that follows the UNIX Philosophy, and I like it. On top of that, it’s real easy to extend the browser using scripts. Uzbl is built on top of Webkit, so it is standards compliant and it passes the acid3 test with flying colors. Off course, it is still alpha/beta so it’s not ultra stable but stable enough for me. And have I mentioned it is way lighter then Firefox? It starts in a snap and it uses a lot less memory.

My config can be found here and my scripts can be found here. Let me know if you have suggestions for my scripts!

Category: Software · Comments (0)
August 8th, 2009

I Messed Up 

Now a years worth of blog posts are gone :’(

Category: ISP · Comments (5)
August 9th, 2008

August 2008 screenshot 

You see:

  • Arch Linux
  • XMonad
  • Dzen
  • conky-cli
  • opera
  • urxvt
  • irssi

I made some changes I planned on for a while. The biggest one is the switch form xmobar to dzen+conky-cli. Much more versatile. Also i cleaned up my xmonad.hs. It’s just how I wanted.
All my configs are found here.

Category: Screenshots · Comments (3)
August 6th, 2008

ZSH, I love it 

I was bored a couple of days ago. I installed xmonad and everything worked like it schould. So I started browsing the ArchLinux wiki searching for something new to install. I heard about zsh-completion being wonderfull but I never understould what zsh was. Zsh is a shell, an alternative to bash. I never had problems with bash but I never founf it really good. I liked it’s completion but I heard zsh’s completion was better.

Zsh is in ArchLinux’ extra repository. You can change from shell using the usermod command. You just do

usermod -s /bin/zsh USERNAME

You have to login and logout to activate the shell. Basic configuration is done in .zshrc. It works like .bashrc with some other commands. My .zshrc is bits and pieces from other people and form my .bashrc. You can find my .zshrc on my git branch. Gentoo’s documentation on zsh is rather good.

Since I now have succesfully installed and configured zsh I am looking for a new project, anyone tips? And also, i would love to see your .zshrc

Category: Linux, Software · Comments (2)
August 4th, 2008

New hosting provider 

From today I am on a different server. About 1,5 years ago I registered www.vincentkriek.nl for the first time. It was a sale wich gave me one year hosting and the domain for 1 euro. Then I wanted more so I started looking for a nice reseller hosting plan. And I found it at www.sorcer.nl.

Now i got a decent control panel, DirectAdmin instead of a home made thing that my previous ISP had, my email hasn’t got a hour delay and I can register different domains on one hosting package. So far I am extremely happy about sorcer. They respond very fast have a nice site, and are not too expensive. They are third in the top 25 of dutch hosting providers.

Category: ISP · Comments (0)
August 3rd, 2008

And the winner is… 

Last week, I wrote that i was still looking for a window manager that I really like. I have tried all the mayor tiling ones and I finally settled with Xmonad. Yes, the window manager with the 300Mb haskell compiler dependecies. I’m okay with it now.

The way xmonad handles two (or more) screens is the way all window managers should do it. You have one set of workspaces. The screens are portals to these tags. So you can have workspace one on screen one and workspace two on screen two. Then you can have workspace two on screen one and workspace four on screen two. A picture to demonstrate:

Xmonad workspace screen explanation

The configuration file is easy to edit and I like it a lot. Even more so then the config file of awesome. It sounds scary to edit a haskell file but haskell is a nice, easy to understand language. My config file is found here.

So the reason I sticked with it were the multiple screen support, config file and the simplicity. I know a 300mb dependecy for a ~1 mb window manager is not really KISS but the way XMonad works is really KISS. That is because only manages your windows. You can choose youre own panel(if any). I like it!

Category: Linux, Window Managers, XMonad · Comments (0)
July 25th, 2008

The quest for the perfect window manager 

When I started with linux, i started with Gnome. It was fine for a while but I didn’t like it very much. You weren’t able to delete all panels for instance, and I wanted to. Also, I don’t like the DE idea. I only want to install what I need.

So I installed Openbox. And it was amazing. The configuration file is very nice, and the whole wm is really clean. It’s in my opinion the best floating window manager. The right-click menu is amazing, you can choose your panel yourself and it has no dependencies! So I ran Openbox for a while. But I only had terminals and a movie and a browser. The browser on screen one, and the rest on screen two. So I figured that with a tiling window manager I would use the space on my screens more efficiently. Sadly, Openbox doesn’t have a tiling feature. Wich I pitty, and quite a lot of archers with me.

But tiling window managers are hard to configure. Xmonad is configured in haskell, wmii in ruby or python and dwm in C. And I am not a programmer (yet). But I tried Xmonad for a while, it’s very nice, the dual screen support is amazing, but I hate installing 300 MB(!) of dependency’s for one program.

But then I found Awesome. And Awesome has an awesome name ánd an awesome configuration file. It is easy to understand and edit. But awesome 3.0 (it’s 2.3 now) is going to have a lua configuration file. And I don’t think that is an improvement. Awesome was the window manager that made it easy to tile.

So I tried dwm, becuase I love the idea of simplicity. Also the configuration file is really nice and clear. More so than awesome’s lua configuration file. But dwm doesn’t do dual screen as awesome. So I am going to stick with awesome for the time being. Learning lua, but when dwm does dual screen like awesome, wich means one statusbar per screen and different tiling layouts for each screen, I am going to install dwm right away. Do, by any chance, you know if I can start two instances of dwm, one for each screen? And what window manager do you use and why?

Category: Linux, Window Managers · Comments (0)
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