• 3 Posts
  • 18 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • River is actually really nice! I have been a Sway user for multiple years before, but as it reached parity with i3, it was deemed “feature complete” (which is reasonable, as it was made to be a drop-in replacement), so I switched to Hyprland, but after making a small contribution I found the development too chaotic, so I started looking for something else.

    I have been really happy with River. It still has some small shortcomings (e.g. minor visual glitches with fullscreening, and some less used options still missing), but the developers are very responsive on IRC (which I’m actually not a huge fan of, this was the first time I had to use it, but it’s OK for what it is) and it being written in Zig is a huge selling point for me, as I don’t have to write any C or C++ to extend it (my first PR is already on the way) when something I’d like to do is not yet possible.

    If you’re willing to spend a while getting to know it and setting up the environment (it relies on external programs for some functionality that is built-in in other compositors, such as monitor management), then I’d definitely say that it’s worth a shot!


  • Because ortholinear split keyboards aren’t that easy to come by (I got tired of confusing my fingers when reaching for letters between them, now there is no “between”, just straight columns. Also, I can hold my hands at shoulder width!), on the other hand this was an option I had all the necessary hardware for, and with some software configuration it is actually really usable!

    (The question could potentially also be “Why aren’t more people using two numpads as a keyboard?”, but I guess that the answer would be somewhere between they don’t care about and they don’t know about the advantages it would provide. 🙃)




  • 1.) I’m using wayland (river as a compositor at this point), and have not set up a key combo for riverctl exit in fear of an accidental trigger, but it might actually be a good idea.
    2.) As far as I know, that only applies to the VTTYs.
    3.) Setting up a screen locker program does seem like a good option for preventing unwanted input (which can occur for other reasons as well, such as my one year old son 😀) without potential loss of work / data! Is swaylock the go to solution for this nowadays?


  • Oh man, did that feel like a long time until I managed to get there… Adding insult to injury was that every step took two tries. First I didn’t type my username for ssh, which resulted in the default termux user being used, so I had to cancel that and try again. After that I tried pkill kanata, which responded with killing pid ... failed: Operation not permitted, which made me realize, that it’s running as root, so I need to use sudo to stop it.

    All this time I was hammering C-c with my other hand and keeping an eye on the screen as well to see what is happening. 😶