The way I work in 2015


my desktop

I always enjoy reading about other people's setup. I can always pick up a tip or two, or at the very least get an idea on how to apply some of the same principles to my own setup. Just because I'm not a Mac OSX or a vim user, doesn't mean I cannot learn from an article with that kind of workflow! This article is may way of giving something back, I hope you will enjoy my tale.

Hardware Operating system Desktop environment Editors Chat & talk Web Browsers Shell Music

The hardware

My work horse is a Thinkpad X1 Carbon laptop with i7 CPU and 8 GB RAM. To it, I've connected two external screens using the display port and the HDMI port on the laptop. No splitter or multiplexer was necessary. The three screens are all a part of the same desktop using xinemera and xrandr. I've written wee script which will add all available external screens to the virtual xinerama destkop. This makes my setup consistent regardless of having 0, 1 or 2 external screens (or 3 for that matter). The tkj setup-screens command can be found on github on my github page.

After the laptop itself, my favourite piece of equipment is my Happy Hacking Professional 2 keyboard. It's really fun to type on. It sounds weird, but sometimes when walking to work in the morning I can look forward to getting into the office and type on it again. It's that great. It's something about the feel of the keys and the flow it gives you. Of course, it's NOISY so you better get noise cancelling headphones for all your colleagues. Or buy them cake, that works too 😉

The operating system

debian

I run Debian GNU/Linux (testing). Debian has been my workstation OS since 2001, and except a one year flirt with Arch, I've been faithful ever since. I find it a nice blend of a lean distro (I start off with just a bare boned install, without X, without zip++ and build it from there, installing just the packages I need) and one which is easy to get working with new hardware and commercial applications like Steam and Skype.

Compared to e.g. Ubuntu, there is more work getting Debian to work, but it's a rewarding effort and it's getting easier with every release.

The desktop environment

fluxbox

Fluxbox gives me a lightning fast and is extremely configurable window manager while yet being pretty to look at. It supports both GNOME and KDE dock apps and have a good selection of themes. I've used it for quite a while now (since 2002) and have a quite stable ~/.fluxbox configuration. Getting up and running on a new computer takes just a minute or two. A few symlinks to my github configuration is all that it takes.

emacs2 web2 talk2
emacs web talk

The number of worskpaces have changed greatly over the years. It's been stable now since 2011, which hopefully means I've finally arrived at the "right" number of workspaces 😉 I'm using a 3x2 desktop grid where the lower 3 desktop row is the main row whereas the row above is offloading space for the applications on the main row. With three physical screens, that's in practice 18 virtual screens, which suits me just fine.

Going the extra mile to rid myself of the mouse

I primarily use the mouse for image editing and web browsing. Thus, I have a number of shortcuts configured in Fluxbox, including: maximise/minimise window, turn on/off window decorations (to get more screen real estate), navigate between workspaces, move & resize windows. I prefix all my DE shortcuts with Ctrl + Shift and have chosen the vim letters for left, right, up, down to form the move shortcuts.

I try to re-map shortcuts in various applications so that they serve similar functions. The VIM shortcuts for moving around the windows is one example, Ctrl + , is another. In Emacs it gives me a list of all functions in the current file (imenu) and in Vivaldi it gives me a list of all the tabs in the current browser window.

Changing between keyboard layouts 🎏

Having shortcuts for switching directly to a given keyboard layout (not cycle between them) is a must. American layout is the best for programming, but I also need Norwegian and German for writing emails.

Some DEs like OSX insists on having the user to cycle through the available layouts (press the shortcut once to go the next one, again to the one after that and so on). I find this unsatisfactory since it requires me to either look at the language switcher (and thus take my eyes off what I'm writing) or I have to test-type a few character to see if I'm on the layout I want.

Lastly, cycling layouts is bad because it leaves no way to guarantee that you are on a given layout. With dedicated shortcuts for layouts, I can be certain that I'm using American before typing a password containing special characters where using German layout would make me enter the password wrongly.

Only one application has a desktop shortcut

I used to have shortcuts for launching my favourite apps, but these days I only have one: Ctrl + Shift + t (new terminal). The reason for this is that most of my favourites are opened once during login (from .xinitrc) and they just keep running forever (forever being a month or two before a kernel upgrade forces me to reboot the machine). The exceptions from this can easily be started from a terminal — and I don't start them often enough to warrant for a dedicated shortcut.

Fast tracking common web browser operations

Since I'm always either in a terminal or have one next to my current window, I've made a few simple BASH scripts for doing common online things. For instance, my company uses JIRA for ticketing, so I've got this wee command j, which will open my browser with the JIRA issue key I give it (j FOO-1234).

Similarly, I've got the command g which will open my browser with a Google search performed on the string I pass it (g What is the answer to life the universe and everything).

Navigating to any app on any workspace

Fluxbox (from version 1.3.7) has fuzzy search for any application open on any of my six workspaces. I hit Ctrl + Shift + o to get the dialogue and type any part of the application's window title to navigate to it.

fluxbox app navigation

In this example, I've typed "fire" to navigate to my Firefox whose window title is: "JSON Schema - Mozilla Firefox". This is really fast and makes it easy to have applications scattered around on the different workspaces while keeping them within easy to reach.

talk 💬

I'd like to keep all communication related distractions on the talk workspace, leaving me "in flow" when I'm coding on my emacs workspace or surfing the web on my web workspace.

The talk workspace has an Emacs session for reading my email and Slack chats (using emacs-slack), as well as the different chat clients which I haven't integrated into my Emacs workflow (yet), like Skype and Line.

web

firefox The web workspace has my main browser windows and web2 has whatever "other" browsers I need to run. Currently, my main browser is Vivaldi and my "other" browsers are Google Chrome, Chromium, Opera & Firefox. Of notable plugins for Firefox, I use Firebug, User Agent overrider and JSONView.

I always crave for keyboard based navigation and Vivalid has a really nice dialogue which I've bound to Ctrl + ,. It allows me to jump to any tab by fuzzy searching:

fuzzy search in Vivaldi

emacs

emacs Lastly, the emacs workspace is where I by far spend most of my time. I use Emacs for most things these days, including email (mu4e), chat on Jabber/GTalk, MSN, Lync/Microsoft Communicator and occationally Skype (bitlbee IRC gateway & erc), note taking (org-mode), Java (eclim & emacs-eclim), Python (anaconda-mode), presentation slides (markdown-mode, reveal.js & pandoc) JavaScript, BASH programming, HTML & CSS. My complete Emacs configuration is available here on github.

emacs2 is for other editors or shells that support Emacs, like running headless Eclipse through the eclim plugin. This is also where I start up IDEA whenever I need to run their debugger or do some large refactorings in my Java code.

Text is eyecandy too

On my right most screen, I have conky running on the root window, printing useful information of system resources like CPU, RAM, disk and network, as well as the top running processes, the time (I auto hid the window manager toolbar where the clock normally would show), the currently running music and so on. In many ways, conky displays the information that you'd typically have in small dock apps in the notification area of your desktop toolbar. You can find my conky configuration here

Shell matters 💻

terminal When I'm not in Emacs or surfing the web with my web browser, I'm in the shell. My terminal of choice is urxvt which is lightweight and at the same time has good Unicode support (up to 3 byte UTF-8 only, not 4 byte characters), is extendable with Perl and supports all features you might be using in xterm or aterm.

clipit To sync the clipboard with urxvt, I have the following perl snippet for calling xsel. Together with these settings in .Xresources, I get clickable links in the shell and get two way clipboard syncing between the other X applications and urxvt. Thanks to ClipIt clipboard manager I've never had any clipboard problems in any applictation no matter graphical toolkit: Gtk+, Qt, Swing & AWT applications all work without a hitch.

Music ♪ ♫ ♬

mpd At work I just have an "endless" playlist of all my music with keyboard shortcuts to pause/resume and skip. Currently, I'm using mpd which does a fine job of keeping track of my music. It's fast and runs in the background of everything.

At home, pretty is an important feature and I therefore tend to prefer Amarok, even though their old 1.4 version was better than the new branch of the music player, I think it's the best and most mature graphical player for the Linux destkop.

That's it

Thank you for reading this far, I hope you've found a few bits and pieces that are useful to you or you've simply gotten an idea on how to implement a feature in a different way for your desktop and workflow.

Any comments or suggestions are most welcome. Or indeed tell me how your setup is. I'd be happy to read about it.

Happy hacking.


Licensed under CC BY Creative Commons License ~ ✉ torstein.k.johansen @ gmail ~ 🐘 @skybert@emacs.ch ~ 🐦 @torsteinkrause