This makes our setup more consistent across the two environments, useful
when switching between them. Note that sway is not a replacement for
bspwm due to how it handles fcitx input with kitty and how it has
built-in vsync.
Since selections are more likely to be temporary than full screen
screenshots, copying their contents to clipboard by default is useful,
although in the future it may be more practical to create an image and
copy to clipboard at the same time, similar to other screenshotting
tools like ShareX.
This makes it easy to switch layouts in kitty and usually get what we
want rather quickly, without having to worry about the current layout
being used.
At some point I disabled this setting, possibly because of a bug or
other issue at the time, most likely related to my use of w3m or a
similar image preview script.
Now that I take advantage of all of kitty's features in 2022, especially
since it has proper fcitx support, there shouldn't be a reason to not
enable dynamic background opacity, as it seems to work flawlessly.
I wrote a script that generated wal completions 4 years ago. Although
the patch was never merged, pywal is a great tool and I can still use
the completions personally, so I might as well add them here.
Now polybar will show on all monitors by default, and we don't have to
update the script every time those monitors change, useful when changing
between computers that use HDMI and computers that use display port, for
example.
Now we no longer have to worry about kitty having an inconsistent color
scheme when changing the color scheme of the rest of the environment,
which means that we can fully use kitty's window management and change
themes with pywal at the same time.
Since I usually have a browser and terminal emulator open most of the
time, I have placed them back as desktop 1 and 2 by default. I'm used to
the file browser being in 3, and 4 serves as media, which is important
for language immersion in particular.
The other 6 icons are numbers for individuals that know how to read
other languages.
This enables us to automatically change kitty colors when changing pywal
color schemes, which means that kitty window management, such as its tab
feature, will honor the new colors of pywal automatically, without
having to restart kitty.
Now that pipewire is more mainstream, we don't have to worry about using
alsa or pulseaudio here which, from what I remember, took more effort
to set up.
There was actually an issue where waybar was using larger padding than
usual, which was fixed by setting the gsettings in our sway config. I
liked the padding changes introduced by the other theme, however, so
this change makes it permanent.
This was cool when we had KDE-specific applications, but since I'm
prioritizing ranger and nautilus now, dolphin isn't needed. Since I'm
focusing heavily on terminal and web-based applications, there is less
need to customize KDE applications specifically.
Two other advantages to this is that I no longer have to manually update
the colors in kdeglobals, and most if not all of the environment can be
programmatically set up with minimal effort.
Now sway behaves similarly to unclutter on bspwm/xorg, and we don't have
to worry about moving the cursor out of the way since it automatically
disappears.
Since ueberzug only works in X, and since ranger previews currently
conflict with tmux due to a new python version on arch linux, ueberzug
has no real advantage besides making image previews work in alacritty,
which I ultimately decided against due to how it handles fcitx input on
Xorg.
One of the conveniences of GNOME is auto-mounting. Although manually
mounting is a good learning exercise, we can improve productivity by
auto-mounting by default.
Looking back at this, meta packages should be one of the most convenient
ways to keep track of packages. It gets the job done and should be more
than sufficient for our use case.
In particular, installing all packages guarantees that we won't "miss
something" and have to install it manually, which is more useful than
having a lower package number count.
The main disadvantage is dealing with constant updates to large packages
in a restrictive internet environment, although it's possible to
mitigate this by separating the smaller packages from the larger ones.
