A few days ago I wrote about making some icons for this device and a few days later they even got added to OnionOS’s themes repo!

Because of this, I was inspired to keep working on a fully fledged theme for my device, which I wanted to do anyway, since nothing was quite my taste.

My favorite theme at the moment was mini.os and also Analogue but I still wanted something that actually followed the style of the Arcticons Icon Pack.

So I basically did more icons. Maybe the biggest problem was trying to keep the line thickness to be equal among the different sizes of the PNG files that represent the status icons, the main menu icons, the list icons and the like. But overall, I think I managed to strike a good balance to make it all look cohesive and minimalistic.

Of course, I also went ahead and followed the color scheme from my website! Which is the wonderful Tokyo-Night color palette.

Because of this, I had to recolor all of the icons to follow the not so white color used in Tokyo-Night, for this I used this simple function and added it to the script.

# Variable for the stroke color
STROKE_COLOR="#a9b1d6" # Change this to the desired stroke color

# Function to change stroke color in SVG files
change_stroke_color() {
    local svg_file=$1
    local color=$2
    sed -i -E "s/(stroke:)(#[0-9a-fA-F]{6}|#[0-9a-fA-F]{3})(;)/\1${color}\3/g" "$svg_file"
    sed -i -E "s/(fill:)(#[0-9a-fA-F]{6}|#[0-9a-fA-F]{3})(;)/\1${color}\3/g" "$svg_file"
}

Once those icons were dealt with, I created the rest of them on Inkscape as well. For some details, like the indicators of the focused icon or list item, I used GIMP.

To avoid problems present in other themes, where the focused item can feel out of place alongside game covers, I decided to make the color fade to the background color, which looks rather elegant anyway, in my opinion.

Finishing thoughts

So, I am quite happy now, my theme is pretty much exactly how I want it, and that is awesome. There are still a few details I may update later in the future, but for now, I am very happy with how it turned out!

In case you want to apply it on your device, you can download it from here!

This is day 53 of #100DaysToOffload, and post 21 for #WeblogPoMo2024.

Although I’ve shared some screenshots before, I’ve never really done full showcase of the whole thing with my gestures and shortcuts. So here it is!

The screens

The lockscreen doesn’t have anything special, but it’s there.

My current homescreen is quite simple. My setup is a single screen with a 12 by 7 grid, with a total of 15 app icons for quick access. I have the default clock widget on top that also shows the date and upcoming alarm. I also disabled the dock—I don’t have any use for it.

The icons I use are from Arcticons, a free and open source icon pack that I have contributed to for a few years already.

The apps

Anyway the apps I have on my homescreen are sorted in 5 columns with 3 rows each. Every column has a certain type of apps in it.

My most important apps are the ones closer to my right thumb, which are my default Phone app, Mihon for manga reading—an alternative to Tachiyomi that is the reader alone a integrated way to get the plugins to access manga from websites—and AntennaPod for Podcasts.

Making use of Nova Launcher’s shortcut gestures, some apps have an extra app I can access by swiping the icon up and down. Swiping down on Mihon will open Librera Reader, my book reader of choice, whenever I don’t use my Kobo. Swiping down on AntennaPod will open YT Music, and up will open Gramophone—or whatever local music player I use, I switch often.

Next column contains my communication apps. My big three are K-9 Mail, which has a swipe down gesture for Proton Mail, Discord that has gestures for Mattermost and Element; and Signal, with gestures for Threema and Conversations

My third column has apps that entertain me, which includes Tusky for mastodon and fediverse accounts (also a gesture for Bluesky), then Brawl Stars because I play it a bit. Cromite is there too (with a gesture for Firefox as well).

Next is my media column, which has Fossify Gallery, Binary Eye, to scan barcodes (for work) and Solid Explorer for file management, that is one of the few apps I paid for—back when I didn’t have a job for stuff like that—and has been worth every penny.

Finally, the last column has whatever other apps I use sometimes, which is KeepassDX (with a gesture for Aegis Authenticator), FeedMe, my feed reader of choice for Android since it integrates with my FreshRSS server, and Droid-ify (with a gesture for the regular Play Store).

All in all, I have access to a ton of apps with just 15 icons in my homescreen.

Final thoughts

You may notice the abscence of WhatsApp and YouTube, which some of my regular readers might expect since they show in my usage stats every month. I actually have a gesture for them rather than an icon, so swiping up and down with two fingers will open one app or the other!

So, yeah, now you have seen through me. These are the icons and apps I use in my setup, quite a lot of stuff packed together, but the result is rather minimal I think.

This is day 29 of #100DaysToOffload

I went to school and it was pretty cool. The only new teacher I got from a management class seems quite cool yet strict. Still I think I’ll be fine. The other teacher I already mentioned, should be quite easy, and the course is all about MATLAB coding, which I am pretty good at. I have to do reports of every work we do though, which is a bit of a hassle but nothing a bit of markdown and pandoc can’t fix.

The rest of the day was spent on ricing my desktop. I have been theming my dunst config, to make my notifications look awesome. I was also looking at some music players for Linux, and I discovered Tauon. Its a great piece of software and quite minimalist. Its available as a flatpak on Void Linux, which is not great. However, it does not look bad at all, because its theming is rather configurable. I have been actually writing a theme using the Tokyo-Night color scheme, which is why I completely forgot about doing my blog for today.

Anyways, I am really, raelly happy with how my current environment and workflow is going. My dotfiles are better than ever! So check them out if you want. My dwm, dunst, alacritty and stuff is quite well themed. Very happy about it.

This is day 18 of #100DaysToOffload

Now I am on Void Linux though, and even if I have access to the latest and greatest software. I decided to return for dwm for a while. Maybe permanently?

I managed to patch everything I ever wanted. Even if I had to do quite a bit of manual work. What I did was use the patching guide by uoou, which used git branches for every patch you apply, and, in my case as suggested by a comment. A “build” branch where I merge all the branches into one, which leads to less errors? Maybe its a placebo, but its quite easy to do.

Patches applied

In the post I mentioned before, I had already mentioned some of my reasoning behind the patches I’ve used. Here I’ll just list them again in case you are too lazy to check that other post. They can be found in dwm’s website.

• alwayscenter
• attachbottom
• autostart
• functionalgapps(+pertag)
• movestack
• shift-tools
• systray

Other changes

For my bar, I went with the default and used aslstatus. Its pretty good! I am using the same configuration I shared in my previous post. Pretty much exactly, even though some more features were added to the tool that you may wanna check out.

Picom, the compositor I use, makes window borders transparent. A couple of lines fix it pretty nicely.

Right now I am still using some systray stuff, like volumeicon, which kinda duplicates the volume info. I will fix it one of these days…

Regardless, here’s how its looking!

Final words

In the end I am quite happy with my current setup. Everything works just fine. I had heard that the systray patch was hard to apply. I don’t know if its the relatively recent patch for dwm 6.4 or if its just that the patching method I mentioned is better. All I did was create a branch with every c+patch applied, then a branch specifically for the systray patch, and I merged them both, there were no errors at all. Thankfully I doubt I’ll add any more patches anytime soon. This is great as it is.

You can find my configuration here. Just build it and it will be good to go.

This is day 13 of #100DaysToOffload

Nowadays though, I’ve found another color scheme that I don’t see mentioned too often. it’s name is Tokyo-Night, and I truly fell in love with it the moment I saw it.

I changed my color scheme on this blog months ago. But the code snippets CSS was still broken until yesterday, when I finally fixed it so now code looks good on my website.

I also updated my spectrwm bar to match the colors correctly, which was pretty cool.

I still mainly use awesomewm, but I have been using spectrwm today and doing those theme changes while I was at it.

I plan to create a repository to host these themes properly, since I couldn’t find the color scheme for anything but VSCode and Vim, so I’ll share the CSS and update my spectrwm dotfiles soon enough.

I’ll share some links in case you want to use this theme too!

• Tokyonight-vim
• Alacritty theme
• Tokyonight for Firefox
• For GTK I find SkeuOSto be suitable enough, its not perfect, but I like it, I don’t mind much.

Coming soon:

• CSS (built with Pygments, can already be seen in my website’s source code)
• FreshRSS TokyoNight Theme?…

This is day 4 of my second run of #100DaysToOffload

But I believe this is the first time that I’ve restrained myself to the same ROM for multiple updates, without any factory reset or wipe of my data. Even mantaining encryption enabled for better security, although I still have superuser enabled via Magisk, but its my phone so deal with it.

This update they fixed plenty of bugs, the most annoying of which was one where the SystemUI stopped working if I accessed an app’s info screen from the recents overview. I also noticed a smoother experience and animations, which are always a little sloppy on 3rd party launchers. Yes, I am still rocking Nova Launcher, its just too good, even if its not FOSS. Don’t bother recommending anything, I’ve tried it all and just keep coming back, sorry.

So yeah, I think I am staying on CR Droid for the time being, the support is great and everything works just fine. So I guess my ROM-hopping has ended when it comes to Android 12 roms. Let’s wait for what 13 has to offer…

Because of this, I decided to just stay in XFCE, the Mint edition I got, for a while, until I figured something out. I could build spectrwm from source, but there is no official guide and, while I think its probably super easy, I figured that if I was going to build a WM from source, it would be dwm.

While I don’t really dislike XFCE, I really wanted to go back to tiling, some things just didn’t work as I wanted them to, and some programs didn’t like to stay where I put them, or couldn’t be resized as easily, and XFCE just lets them be, even if I just want them to be smaller or something. During some free time I got, I decided it was finally time to set dwm up once and for all.

I have switched to dwm in the past, in fact I’ve even made a post about the setup I used back then, but I never wrote something for this blog about it. I guess it was about time.

My patch selection

The patches I’ve decided to use are quite pretty similar to what I would get with spectrwm default keybindings with a few additions. I think its a pretty simple and minimal set.

• attachbottom: This is a really simple patch that I really, really like, I discovered thanks to HexDSL, and I prefer it a lot from the default, since windows appear at the bottom of the stack and don’t move around the rest. Its pretty comfy and easy to apply.
• functionalgapps+pertag: I like this patch because it basically applies two in one. This makes it so each tag (or workspace) can have different modes, like, if you have a tag floating, you can have others in master and stack, or another tag maximized. Of course, I also really like gaps, even if they can be a bit useless sometimes, but I can resize them in real time and stuff like that, it makes my brain feel happy.
• movestack: This is a basic function that should be there by default, changing the position of a window in a stack is something I consider fairly important. Dwm only allows moving something from the stack to the master position, and a lot of people can only live with that, so you might now actually need this, but I do.
• alwayscenter: This makes it so if you have something configured as floating in the config file, it will be centered each time you open it. It does not center stuff you make float manually tho, which fits my needs
• movecenter: This lets me use a keybinding to center whatever window I have floating around, its pretty useful and complements the previous patch nicely.
• shift-tools: Another useful patch that lets me move around tags with something other than MODKEY+number, for example, drag a window an switch tags alongside it, and other nice features. This is a must for me, might as well be the most important patch, I guess I could live without the rest somehow, but I am just too used to this one, which is available in most tiling window managers by default.
• autostart: I decided to have an autostart patch due to some problems I had while using .xinitrc and some programs failing to run properly, but this patch lets me have more control and be completely sure that whatever I want to run will do just do it.

Notes

There is still one patch I have not added, but I used in my previous configuration, and that is status2d, because it lets me use custom colors, which is what I wanted to have in spectrwm in the first place, but I didn’t feel like adding it right now, since I am happy with my current bar.

I also was a bit interested in swallow, but I don’t really need it, I am used to other methods already and the situation where it could be useful isn’t really that common for me.

My bar

There are many ways to customize the bar, from xsetroot, to dwmblocks or slstatus, all of them are pretty good ways to make use of it. However, I went ahead and used aslstatus, which is basically the same as suckless’ original tool, but asynchronous, I can make my volume update in real time, while the weather info is only updated every 30 minutes or so. Its pretty good and I really like it, and it works with status2d and colors, whenever I get the time to set it up properly.

It’s what I used in the mastodon post I shared above, so it works great. Its also the reason I went with an autostart patch, since running it from .xinitrc was not reliable.

Finishing up

There isn’t really a lot else to say, I guess I could share the current config in my git repository. I will probably do it soon enough, there are still some things I want to change but I am pretty happy with how it looks now. I like the simplicity I went for. Sadly, LabVIEW, the program I installed yesterday, hates being told where to stay, so I’ll have to stick with XFCE during those classes.

You can see my configuration file for dwm here, but its nothing too special. My bar is also just using the defaults, and this is at the bottom:

static struct arg_t args[] = {

/* function		format		argument	interval (in ms) */

{ netspeed_rx,  "  %sB/s",     IFC,        2 _SEC, END },
{ netspeed_tx,  " -  %sB/s |", IFC,        2 _SEC, END },
{ disk_free,    " %s |",		"/",	    25 _SEC,END },
{ cpu_perc,	    "  %3s%% |",	NULL,		1 _SEC,	END },
{ vol_perc,		" %s |",	    NULL,		0,		END },
{ wifi_perc,	" 直 %3s%% |",	IFC,		2 _SEC,	END },
{ battery_perc,	"   %3s%% |",	"BAT0",		1 _MIN,	END },
{ datetime,		"  %s ",	    "%H:%M:%S",	1 _SEC,	END },

};

This has been day 95 of #100DaysToOffload

I am not really sure if it was just the ROM itself, the recovery I used or maybe I have been doing it wrong all this time, but this time I did not have any bootloops, no need to reboot multiple times, no failures while installing Magisk or graphical glitches and overall bugs. Everything simply worked out.

Yes, I did a couple of reboots because that’s what needs to be done when installing Magisk and restoring Migrate backups, but I did not got stuck watching a logo spin or having apps crashing as soon as I opened them. Maybe its just that my phone is already at such a mature state where roms simply don’t break as easily, or maybe its jut a result of my experience where I didn’t immediately got out of my way to get the first Android 12 rom that came out, but regardless, installing this was a breeze, I did not lost any data, a flawless transition from my previous ROM.

I took quite a lot of measures this time, since I was fairly afraid of doing the jump, it always happens when a few months go by and I stick to the same rom for too long.

I copied my Downloads, Pictures, Podcasts, DCIM and other common folders that contained information I deem worthy of salvation, I did backups of app data, I even did a full backup from my recovery (which is Orange Fox in case you are interested).

But everything was not needed at all. Of course that does not mean I won’t do all of this procedure again next time, since you never know what could happen!

Anyways, everything’s fine, I am having fun, and Android 12 looks nice! So lets go over some of the things about the software itself.

The rom I am using is MSM Extended, it has quite a lot of features. Android 12 has some smooth animations, the theming works great, notifications are a bit bloated but they work, its fine overall.

When it comes to Android privacy and roms, I always see everyone recommending Lineage, but I find it incredibly weird that basically nothing else gets mentioned other than Pixel exclusive roms. Besides, privacy is not the only reason there is to switch roms, if you want features, customization, better defaults and the best Android has to offer, there are a lot of options to use, such as Resurrection Remix, Paranoid, Pixel Experience, Dot OS. The list keeps going.

Privacy and security are important, but they are not Android’s strongest field, at all, so just enjoy the life with the faster, cleaner and most customizable experience smartphones can have. Or well, that’s what I think of this.

This has been day 91 of #100DaysToOffload

Switching to dwm

First, I switched to DWM as my tilling window manager of choice. Yeah, right after I upload my blog showcasing my dotfiles and my spectrwm configuration, I pick up my stuff, git clone the dwm repo and start learning how to patch this thing so it does the stuff I want. And guess what, I couldn’t be any happier right now. DWM is not the window manager I wanted, but the one I needed.

Seriously, once its all setup and ready to go, it looks exactly like my previous spectrwm configuration. However, the bar is better, the tags are clickable (I know, I am sorry), and (again, I am sorry) I can change my gaps size on the fly.

I no longer have access to a config file that can be changed on the fly. But it is still quite easy to read, and building from source is not slow at all. Besides that, the bar (which I spent most of the time customizing) is a separate program (aslstatus btw), so I don’t need to reboot the WM to see the changes.¹

Overall, I am really happy with DWM, and I will probably talk more about it in the future.

More services for my Raspberry Pi

Since my Pi is confined to my local network, I decided to keep playing around with it and using programs that can be used despite said limitation.

I already mentioned Pi-hole, which is an ad blocking program that works in the whole local network. Since then I added radicale, which is a contact and calendar server that uses CalDAV protocol, I can just save my contacts on my phone, and using DAVx5 it gets synced as soon as I am connected to my network.

Rethinking my RSS setup

Another program I decided to try was an RSS server. Something that I could use and would work with Newsboat, a terminal-based RSS reader that I believed was local only. But after reading the documentation, I realized it was able to work with multiple services like Newsblur, Tiny Tiny Rss, FreshRSS and Miniflux.

At first I tried and enjoyed Newsblur, but after I found the limitations of the free tier, I decided to use my Pi and find some server to use. I chose Miniflux, and I am pretty happy with how it turned out.

While the integration with Newsboat was fine. There are not a lot of apps compatible with Miniflux, at least on F-Droid, the only one available was Fluent Reader, which looks like an iOS app, and while functional, didn’t really fit my style. After some digging on Reddit, I found out about Miniflutt, which is available on GitHub and, while a little bare bones, works fine enough. I really like having my read and starred articles synced across my devices, the kind of feature I didn’t know I needed!

Designing some more icons on Inkscape

Of course, I am also making icons for the Arcticons icon pack, while I don’t have as much time during school, I have still managed to create a few icons for some apps, including the Miniflux RSS readers I found. You can see the pull request here.²

Finishing up

So yeah, just a quick catch up, Here is a quick list of another quick things I did:

• I followed a bunch of new RSS feeds from sites that appear on the Tech News videos from Techquickie.
• I am using Emacs and org mode to take notes for school, because it has a feature to copy and paste screenshots easily!
• I might switch to Vim again because HexDSL has a script I could modify to do the same thing!
• I posted a meme on Fosstodon and its getting more attention than I expected, I also decided to make my account locked, so you have to send a follow request.
• I am learning some fun robotics stuff at University, but the site feels like something made for kids (Visual scripting), I wish they taught us some real coding.

Anyways, I wrote more than I expected to! This has been day 55 of #100DaysToOffload. I hope you have a great day.

A bit of back story

The first one I tried was Awesome, back when I was using Pop OS, which was my first distro. I used it for months, and I really liked it, but I didn’t really understand it. The config file of this WM is written in Lua, and is extremely customizable, allowing for theming, widgets creation and so much more. But, since I didn’t know the language, I copy-pasted code from the internet until I got something I liked. However, loading times got huge, and I did not know how to troubleshoot it, maybe a missing library or some code that was too resource heavy. The point is, that only the default themes worked fast enough for my liking. Ultimately, I decided to try something else.

Making the change

I had heard about Spectrwm for a while, and tried it a couple of times, but I never managed to customize my bar panel successfully. But after watching Distrotube’s video on Spectrwm, I noticed that I made a pretty dumb mistake, I did not make the bar script an executable (yeah, I know, pretty obvious once you realize).

Customizing my bar

The bar can be configured in different ways, I just use a bash script, I named it baraction.sh and it is located in ~/.config/spectrwm/, I followed Distrotube’s config, and took some ideas from r/unixporn I had to setup some colors inside my .spectrwm.conf file, which looks something like this:

# Bar Settings
bar_enabled			= 1
bar_action			= ~/.config/spectrwm/baraction.sh
bar_action_expand			= 1
bar_border_width	    	= 1
bar_border[1]		    	= rgb:18/18/18
bar_border_unfocus[1]		= rgb:18/18/18
bar_color[1]	    		= rgb:2e/34/40,rgb:eb/cb/8b,rgb:a3/be/8c,rgb:bf/61/6a,rgb:b4/8e/ad,rgb:88/c0/d0,rgb:d0/87/70,rgb:3b/42/52,rgb:4c/56/6a
bar_color_selected[1]		= rgb:88/c0/d0
bar_font_color[1]		= rgb:ec/ef/f4,rgb:2e/34/40
bar_font			= mononoki Nerd Font:pixelsize=15:antialias=true
bar_justify			= right
bar_format			= +|L +@bg=0;+S +L +@bg=0; +@bg=8; +C +@fg=0; +|2R +A +@bg=0;+@fg=0; %a, %b %d %R +<    +<

Scripts with wmctrl and other configurations

Spectrwm is can be controlled with a little program named wmctrl, wich interacts with EWMH compatible X window managers, and I can use it to make some interesting things. For example, Spectrwm does not play nice with polybar, trayer and similar tools. Since I use the default bar, I dont really have a problem with this for the most part. Nonetheless, I made a script that moves my systray to my current workspace, it looks like this:

#!/bin/bash	
current_ws="$(wmctrl -d | grep '*' | awk '{print $1}')"
wmctrl -r panel -t $current_ws

I just run it inside of the bar script, so it updates at the same time.

My current setup (constantly evolving)

I really love how spectrwm is so easy to configure in general, as you saw with the little snippet I shared, Spectrwm does not need any specific programming language to understand what is going on, just a bit of text formatting and some help from the manpage, and everything ends up working out. In the end, I have this is my current setup.

There is still work to do, but I am really happy with the results, I am stilll playing around with other scripts and things. If you wanna get my current dotfiles, you can do so here.

Day 4 of #100DaystoOffload

I have always liked the freedom that Android can give u as an operating system, ever since I got that first weird Chinese phone my mother got from a random store with no warranty at all and a battery that was about to explode, I fell in love with how different I could make my phone look compared to everyone else’s just by installing a few apps in those 512 Mb of storage.

At the time, I watched videos from the Spanish youtube channel Pro Android which showcased different launchers and apps to customize my device. However, I had Android 2.3, which was already old at the time, and even tho I rooted my device (or I thought I did, I probably got a virus or something) most launchers, including Nova Launcher, did not run at all. so I had to settle on Holo Launcher.

It was not until my third phone, where I finally managed to get wild with the customization I got, a Samsung Galaxy s3 mini, with ROM support and every app I wanted working because of that. I might talk about that in future.

📱 Android customization today

I want to focus my first blog on a poll I did, that is still going on Mastodon here and talk about my opinions on some of the launchers I’ve used over the years.

Nova Launcher

Everyone should know this one, it has been my go-to ever since I got it, as a teenager I was unable to buy it, and my family wasn’t willing to pay for apps, but it was the first thing I got when I finally got some money from Google Rewards. It has every function you can imagine. It’s gesture system is like no other, and the new gestures on icons and folders, allows me to have run up to three apps, from a single icon, by tapping it, or swiping up or down. I can make it even better if I apply the same gestures to a folder, so with a single icon, I get to access any app I want.

This is my current setup, although I change it pretty often:

KISS Launcher

Now, this is another launcher that I use sometimes, in fact, after the mentioned poll, I decided to give it another try, and I am quite happy with the results. It is very lightweight and customizable, it’s tags feature works great and allows me to categorize my apps as I want (If only I didn’t have to setup every app individually) and once it’s done, there is nothing as cool as typing a category and getting the results you need.

This is how I am rocking it today, as you can see, pretty minimalistic

Microsoft Launcher

Back when I was not as privacy-aware, I used Microsoft Launcher, and I really, really, liked it. it had a lot of the same features Nova provided, completely free, and I could have everything linked up between my Windows computer, and my device.

I am not currently using it, but seriously, the amount of customization and ease of use was amazing.

Other launchers

Some launchers I have used before are here, I am skipping some tho.

• Lawnchair: This is promising, but it has stopped development (it is said that it’s just a break, so let’s see) and Nova is already catching up in their betas (which are more stable than Lawnchair’s), but it offers a lot of unique functionality, like using multiple icon packs at the same time, if you want the latest updates, join their Telegram channel.
• Niagara Launcher: Very minimal and with some pretty animations. similar to kiss, but feels a lot more polished (KISS is more functional, snappy, less eye-candy), it has paid features that might get your attention, like folders and such.
• Posidon Launcher: A very unique launcher that features an RSS feed on it’s home screen, I have been testing it and it has worked before, but currently it is crashing on me quite often, but seriously, it is a great FOSS application that you should try if you have not, the dev got a Telegram channel too.

💭 Final thoughts

This is my first proper blogpost here, and I want it to take part of the #100DaysToOffload challenge. I might go into more detail about some launcher, or just focus on new discoverings I make along the way.

Besides launchers, I have also used different icon packs, gesture applications, android themes and root applications. So I hope I get to talk about those in the future

If you have some launcher, or topic you want me to talk about, feel free to @ me on my Mastodon