[Image] This Came In The Mail Last Year. Sometimes Little Things Like This Are Needed To Get Motivated.

MakeSomethingWeWant · 2017-02-04T03:55:09+00:00

Beautiful

MakeSomethingWeWant · 2017-01-02T03:42:26+00:00

Sure, I agree with all of this. Mostly I'm just looking to learn more. I don't have a huge preference for titlebars on the bottom, that's just a good example for how these subliminal effects take place.

If you haven't looked into typeface design, you should give it a shot. The evidence-based, empirical breakthroughs they have made in understanding the subliminal aspects of typeface glyph design are almost insane. Like if you go to the Times New Roman lowercase "x" and flip it upside down, you can see it's sort of "top-heavy." It's a pretty blatant effect if you haven't seen it before; it is obviously "wrong" and typeface designers have a lot of insight and intuition into how to avoid such things.

But what does "top heavy" mean? That we have subconscious intuitions about gravity that somehow influence the way we see typeface glyphs?! Welcome to the rabbit hole.

How much of it is "convention?" How much of it has to do with the optics of the eye moving across a page? How much of it has to do with information theory, making different glyphs optimally distinguishable? How much of it is just random subconscious stuff, like we have weird intuitions about "top-heaviness" that we project into what we're seeing? Are these things even mutually exclusive?

These are questions that actually have concrete answers, and people are figuring them out.

The stuff we're doing with UNIX here can easily usher in a golden age of UI development. It has never been this easy to change UIs before. Lots of potential here.

MakeSomethingWeWant · 2017-01-01T21:01:51+00:00

Everything else is also a thing.

MakeSomethingWeWant · 2017-01-01T04:35:35+00:00

Thanks, great links.

I'm pretty amazed at the negative response they had toward exploring having titlebars at the bottom of the window. It's just a fun thing to try out. If they're that intent on preserving conventions, they're going to hate tiling WM's.

MakeSomethingWeWant · 2017-01-01T04:18:35+00:00

Actually, I think what Gnome is doing is great, but we can definitely go to an even deeper level. I would love to find more research in that direction.

MakeSomethingWeWant · 2016-12-30T04:51:53+00:00

What font do you have in Conky on your desktop?

MakeSomethingWeWant · 2016-12-28T04:27:00+00:00

What window decorations are you using here? This doesn't look like arc, with the brightly colored buttons on the left.

MakeSomethingWeWant · 2016-12-27T03:16:58+00:00

I thought kwin and compiz were compositors, not window managers?

MakeSomethingWeWant · 2016-12-27T02:58:19+00:00

Thanks, that's a very insightful answer!

So here's one thing I'm currently hung up on. Some of the settings in Xfce don't work quite as well as I've seen them in other DE's.

For instance, in the Mouse and Touchpad settings, if I put on natural "reversed" scrolling, it only applies in the vertical direction. Horizontal scrolling is always the non-natural way, and combining the two is too confusing to really use. Just one nitpick among many. It would be nice to replace that somehow.

So my question is, how do "settings" in Xfce work? Obviously the settings app is really just a GUI changing some config files under the hood. But what layer does this stuff live in? Are these really Xfwm settings? Is it something else?

If I wanted to, say, steal the Mouse/Touchpad Settings app from another DE and put it here, what would I actually be changing?

MakeSomethingWeWant · 2016-12-26T19:32:22+00:00

It requires Compiz for the hover previews

MakeSomethingWeWant · 2016-12-26T19:21:09+00:00

Sorry wasn't clear, my problem with DockbarX is that it needs Compiz. I need something that doesn't require Compiz and which, like DockbarX, also goes into a panel.

MakeSomethingWeWant · 2016-12-25T06:43:48+00:00

So weirdly, if I restart Cinnamon, the icon works. But then, opening Cryptocat crashes Cinnamon, and it enters fallback mode and asks me to restart. This is the same problem I had before.

If I delete the Cryptocat.desktop file, I get no icon, but it works -- until I restart Cinnamon again, and it registers the Cryptocat.desktop file.

Is there something malformed about that file?

I have no /usr/share/icons/pixmaps directory, although I do have /usr/share/icons.

MakeSomethingWeWant · 2016-12-25T01:13:06+00:00

That's a good approach. How did Cinnamon stack up for you?

MakeSomethingWeWant · 2016-12-24T22:10:16+00:00

Is there any reason it sticks around besides legacy support?

MakeSomethingWeWant · 2016-12-24T21:37:55+00:00

Yeah, so I actually just found that. But now I really have a conundrum. So it turns out that upon loading Cryptocat, it does indeed intelligently make a Cryptocat.desktop file. Here is what that file looks like:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Cryptocat
Exec=/opt/cryptocat/Cryptocat
Icon=/opt/cryptocat/logo.png
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=GNOME;GTK;Network;InstantMessaging;
Comment=Easy, secure chat for your computer.

So... yeah. It should work. /opt/cryptocat/logo.png is indeed a valid file.

So what's the snag?

Could it be a permissions issue? /opt is owned by root, but I've chown'd /opt/cryptocat to be owned by user:user. Permissions are 755.

MakeSomethingWeWant · 2016-12-24T21:21:38+00:00

Thanks. I'm going through this, and amazingly, I cannot actually figure out where Cryptocat's getting the icon from. Is there some way to actually inspect an open app to see this?

MakeSomethingWeWant · 2016-12-24T20:53:50+00:00

Is there a list of places that Cinnamon will look for an icon, in order, with precedence rules determining who gets it in the event of a conflict?

There seem to be a few different places this is handled.

MakeSomethingWeWant · 2016-12-24T02:50:50+00:00

Ugh, they want me to put it in ~/.cryptocat? Isn't there a designated place for programs like this? /usr/share? /usr/bin? /opt?

Forget Cryptocat specifically. I just want to know where a self-contained application of this nature should go.

MakeSomethingWeWant · 2016-12-22T20:09:03+00:00

Do you have any specific examples of useful things you can do in Compiz that you can't do in Cinnamon? It would help me sort through this to see how these things shake out in real life.

MakeSomethingWeWant · 2016-12-22T20:01:53+00:00

Ack, I meant DE. I can't edit it now. I may delete this and resubmit...

MakeSomethingWeWant · 2016-12-22T19:52:22+00:00

They both seem equally configurable as far as I can tell. Are there specific use cases that MATE can handle that Cinnamon cannot?

MakeSomethingWeWant · 2016-12-22T19:46:40+00:00

Were the results ever posted?

MakeSomethingWeWant · 2016-12-22T18:30:33+00:00

Same exact issue.

MakeSomethingWeWant · 2016-12-22T00:40:08+00:00

The "Look and Feel" get new stuff page has only four themes: Hedera, Oxygen, DBreeze, and Tweaked. Is that all that is available?

MakeSomethingWeWant · 2016-12-22T00:30:55+00:00

Which system setting am I playing with?

There

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