xmonad

For over a year now I have used Openbox as my only window manager in Linux. It is lightweight, stable, easily customizable and fast, yet somehow I was interested in something new.

Xmonad is the first tiling manager that I installed. I chose Xmonad because it seems to be the most popular out of them all. It has great documentation and community.
Den ganzen Beitrag lesen…

While browsing various Linux related forums, I have noticed that people mention tiling window managers more often. They are saying things like – awesome, dwm, xmonad, wmii. And the screenshots associated with them are really pretty not with eye candy but with their simplicity.

So, I did a research and educated myself about tiling windows managers. The main idea for a tiling window manager is – it arranges windows so that no desktop space is wasted – every open window is relatively maximized.

As Wikipedia says:

In computing, a tiling window manager is a window manager with an organization of the screen into mutually non-overlapping frames, as opposed to the more popular approach of coordinate-based stacking of overlapping objects (windows) that tries to fully emulate the desktop metaphor.

This concept seemed to me very appealing, since I like to have things organized. Shuffling throughout many windows just to find the needed one takes a lot of time.

Besides that I like exploring new things, especially those that are considered to be elite. So next article will be about Xmonad.

Today I got fed up with the fact that I don’t see fonts in Linux as I should. Luckily after about 30 minutes of browsing through Arch Linux forums, wiki and googling around, I fixed the problem.

For starters, I discovered that there is a configuration file for fonts, which can do interesting stuff. Not only you can set default font options like hinting and so on, but you can also define a system-wide font-family. Thanks to awesome Arch Wiki I got a nice configuration file. After restarting X, I nothing much really changed, somewhere in the web fonts had changed, but still something looked wrong.

After some research I found out that changing DPI might solve that. It seems that there are two standards for DPI being 72 for Macs and 96 for PCs. So, I checked my current DPI

xdpyinfo | grep dots

resolution:    86×85 dots per inch

This did not seem right. I decided to stay with the PC standard, so a line to xorg.conf fixed all my problems.

Option    “DPI”   “96×96″

Now everything seems perfect, although in the same time weird, since I haven’t accustomed to the current changes. Fonts are more readable, easier on eyes and just right. An hour spent