DEV Community: mareksamec

Will tiling window managers give you better productivity?

mareksamec — Thu, 18 Mar 2021 22:49:14 +0000

Tiling window manager users often claim they bring superior productivity, are light on resources, and offer excellent customizability. But is it really true? Let's discuss this a bit and let's have a look at some tiling WMs for Linux. Although Linux is their main domain you can also find tiling scripts for Windows and even macOS.

What is a tiling window manager?

First, do you actually know what is a tiling window manager? Most of you are probably familiar with stacking window managers which are used in Windows and macOS. It means that when you open a new window, it will appear on top of other windows. You can freely move it, resize it, minimize it, and so on. Tiling window managers take a different approach. The windows are automatically arranged in a predefined pattern. On top of that, the windows will be automatically moved and resized to match this pattern. The most common patterns are:

Spiral:

Master window with a left or right stack of secondary windows:

Stripes

Centered master

And many more...

Your first thought might be that this can be quite limiting. In some cases, yes, but it also frees you from using the mouse to some extent. Most of these WMs also allow you to make some of the windows floating or draw them on top of others regardless of the active pattern. Often, you have to specify which windows will behave like this, but mostly this will be applied for dialog windows, popups, and so on. As you can see when you have too many windows open, some of them can become very small. To offset this, tiling WMs rely heavily on workspaces or tags that you can assign to the windows. You can then easily switch between workspaces and it can appear as easy as switching weapons in Quake 3 arena.

But why?

That's a good question. If you'll watch some of the tiling window manager enthusiasts on YouTube (links are at the end of this article), you may notice that they use the terminal a lot and when they edit text or code they don't use fancy IDEs like Eclipse, vscode, Pycharm, etc. Instead, they use vim, emacs, and other applications that can run directly in the terminal.

Most of the tiling WM's were actually designed to be mainly used with terminal windows (or with terminal emulator windows to be more exact). These did not come from product designers thinking about simple user experience like Steve Jobs, but from programmers and sysadmins who spend a lot of time in the terminal, need to have multiple terminal windows open at the same time, etc. These people just want the system to get out of their way and let them do their job. Nice gui and buttons are not the priority here. Instead, the emphasis is put on usability, keyboard-centric design, and minimalism. But can tiling WMs really deliver on this promise?

Terminate gui, switch to the terminal

Well, yes and no. Tiling WM can indeed speed up your work when you mostly use terminal apps. It is so easy to open a new terminal (usually just press Super + Enter). A super key can be (Win, Cmd, or another key which you can define). If your daily routine is connecting to remote servers, installing stuff, writing server scripts, you might not touch the mouse for hours.

This is a pretty old picture from the awesomewm home page. It illustrates its best use-case pretty well. Source: awesomewm.org

BUT. If you need to use many different gui apps it can get pretty messy. For instance, you have 4 web apps open in different browser tabs, you need to copy values from multiple excel/LibreOffice sheets paste them in your ticketing tool, then run few commands in the terminal, copy and send the results to your colleague via Slack, etc. you will find yourself juggling with the workspaces windows, tiling, untiling the windows, etc. That's simply because forced tiling can make some apps behave weird and you will need to add specific configurations to your WM to make them usable. In the end, you will spend time fighting with your environment and it will just make you slower.

Of course, some folks are not programmers or Linux/Unix admins and they still use tiling WMs. For instance, if you are a (data) scientist who prefers minimal statistical apps like R, you write your papers using LaTeX or Groff you don't need a fancy desktop environment like GNOME or KDE. You might prefer a minimal environment, where you can get stuff done. If you occasionally need to use more gui apps, you can still make it work if you have multiple monitors and you will create a fixed cockpit-like workspace: browser opens on a screen A, your terminals are on a screen B. The other less used apps are on a different workspace etc. But if you suddenly need to add some more stuff into the mix you will start to sweat.

Minimized bloat, over-maximized configuration

Another important part is the configuration. None of the tiling WMs that I know comes with a settings app where you can just press buttons, select values, and configure your desktop environment. Instead, you edit a text configuration file. Examples are i3, bspwm or xmonad. Some WMs don't even have the config file and you have to directly edit the source code and recompile the WM after every change. A very good example is dwm. One can also find something in between like awesomewm where you basically edit Lua script code that generates parts of the WM gui. If you felt quite good until now, chances are that now you are much less optimistic about ever using something like this.

Do you dislike somewhat bloated environments like GNOME, KDE, or Cinnamon? Then you might just feel at home with let's say awesomewm or bspwm. But while using one of these you will realize just how much of the ordinary things DEs do for you. Wifi connection, sound management, tray icon, start menus, all these things are usually not part of the basic feature set of tiling WMs. It will be your task to find utilities to fill these gaps or use basic Linux services and GNU components and create your own simple gui. It's easier with some WMs' harder with others. For some users, it became something like a mantra: "If you don't build your own desktop, you're not the troo 'nix haxxor..."

Conclusion

If you feel limited by the traditional stacking window managers you can give tiling WMs a try. My recommendation is to start with i3 as it offers quite many features out of the box and even gives you nice intro into how to set it up. Later you can try something more advanced. You can also use tiling WM alongside your DE and see how you'll like it. I use awesomwm and KDE Plasma. It actually works quite well, I just had to figure out how to make some things work together (integrate Kwallet, use Klipper for shared clipboard history, etc.). You can make the DEs work with GNOME, KDE, or XFCE apps and daemons running in the background.

That's it hope this article gave you some good insight!

Some links for further reading/watching:

Check DistroTube, Luke Smith, Brodie Robertson, or Donald Feury for the start.

GameStop, Wall Street? What is actually happening?

mareksamec — Sat, 30 Jan 2021 10:22:32 +0000

NOTE: This article was originally written for an uneducated audience without deep knowledge of internet, social networks and markets.

What is all the fuss about GameSpot? What is happening on Wall Street? 💰

To put it shortly a big group of amateur traders connecting on a web forum/social platform called Reddit joined up and crushed plans o few big investors. These investors wanted to make money on GameStop and other companies whose value is dropping.

Making money when the stock value is increasing over time can be easier to imagine. You buy stocks (like Tesla, Facebook, etc.) and you hope, that over time, the stock value increases as the company's value rises. That is if the company is successful or when the public has such an impression🤑. If this happens, you can sell the stock a few years later and keep the difference as a profit. But how can investors make money, when a company's stock value is actually decreasing?

The answer is "short selling". Short selling or "shorting" is an advanced trading technique. Is it something sketchy or immoral? Most likely not, let me explain. You can buy stocks, but you can also borrow them in the same way as you borrow money, cars, or other things. When you return the stock, you have to pay some fee for borrowing it. Now how can you use this to make money?

Let's say you borrow 10 stocks of Tesla when each stock costs $1000. In total, you would have $10000 worth of Tesla stocks. Now when you borrow stocks, you usually don't need to return the same stocks you bought. You can for instance buy 10 stocks from other sellers and then return these to the lender to replace the 10 stocks you have originally borrowed.

When you borrow 10$ from your friend and spend it, you can go to work and earn a new $10 and return them to your friend.

It goes the same with stocks. If the stocks are traded publicly they are usually mutually interchangeable. So what you can do, is borrow 10 stocks of Tesla and sell them immediately. You will earn $10000 and you will pay some fee to the person who lent you the Tesla stocks the same way you pay interest to the bank when you borrow money. Let's say the stock price indeed decreases over time and one Tesla stock is now worth $900. You will buy 10 shares of Tesla, which will now be worth $9000. Now you will return these 10 shares of Tesla to the lender. Do you see? You have borrowed 10 shares, and a few months later you have returned the 10 shares back. But because you have sold these shares for $10000 right after borrowing them, you now have $1000 extra. Of course, you will have to pay some interest for borrowing the shares, let's say that might be $200. That's quite high, but you still have an $800 profit which is nice!

So where is the catch? This strategy is very risky ⚠:

⚡ Let's say you borrow 10 stocks, sell them immediately but in 3 months, Elon Musk manages to increase the value of one stock from $1000 to $2000 by a single post on his Twitter 😁😎. You will then have to pay $20000 to buy the 10 stocks. You will lose $10000!
⚡ If you buy stock and you speculate that the value will increase over time, you can only lose what you invested. But with short selling, your loss is not limited because theoretically, the stock value can grow infinitely!

❓ Now to answer the original question:
In many cases, investors put money to hedge funds that utilize short selling and other advanced trading techniques to generate profit over time. This is simply another way to invest money. Some hedge funds bought a lot of GameSpot stocks. Traders on Reddit saw that big players are speculating on the value decrease so they decided to troll them a bit by overbuying the stock. When there is a demand the stock value increases. This threw a big wrench to the hedge funds strategy and caused a massive loss. Why was this possible? Thanks to innovations and internet availability, stock trading is now available to anyone with a smartphone and a trading app like Robinhood or eToro. You don't need to go to the bank or a broker to start a trading account. You also don't need to pay the trading fees that discouraged many small traders in the past. To put it simply, the game has changed 😎.

App tips for Windows power users

mareksamec — Sun, 26 Jan 2020 22:01:56 +0000

This article was originally published on my steemit blog here: https://steemit.com/windows/@marek.samec/app-tips-for-windows-power-users
This is an updated version.

If you like your Windows workstation or you are forced to use Windows by your employer, here are some apps that can boost your productivity and effectiveness. Most of these tools are free and open source or at least have some type of free version available. I have tested these apps under Windows 7 and Windows 10 (except for Double commander which I extensively tested only under Windows 10) and they worked without major issues. With an exception for Autohotkey, all of them also work without admin rights.

Autohotkey

Or just AHK in short. This software makes Windows much more useful. It allows you to map and script your own hotkeys. For instance, this simple mapping will launch Cmder terminal when you press Ctrl + Alt + t

; Launch terminal Ctrl + Alt + t

^!t::

Run, C:\Users\marekuser\Applicaitons\cmder\Cmder.exe

Return

But you can do much more. This, for instance, launches Outlook 'New message' dialog and adds the content of your clipboard to the To: field:

^+!n::        
Run, "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\OUTLOOK.EXE" /c ipm.note /m "%clipboard%

My favorite use for AHK is to map keyboard shortcuts to the documents that I open often or map a shortcut that synces my local folder with the corporate NAS server via WinSCP. If you are into scripting, you can even write some basic utilities within AutoHotkey. It is capable of creating simple graphical windows, dialogs, and popups. Advanced operations with the system and windows explorer can be done with Windows shell commands (but be careful here, they can mess things up if used wrongly).

You can check the documentation or visit the forums to see some other interesting user scripts.
Installation of AHK requires admin rights but you don't need them for regular usage after installation. Loading new scripts into AHK also does not require admin rights but some commands and scripts might not work, especially if they modify the registry or some system variables.

Cmder

If you are used to GNU/Linux desktops you will most likely miss a good console in Windows. In that case, Cmder might come in handy. It gives you classic windows CMD shell upgraded with some goodies normally available in Linux. One of the main advantages is nice command history and command completion thanks to the integrated clink. There are some applications from windows git bash console which is also integrated to Cmder by default. You can use commands like git, vim editor and some Linux commands that have a bit clunky alternatives on windows cmd (ls, less, grep and so on). You can also define your own aliases and add other executables such as python, fzf (great command line fuzzy search) and so on. Cmder is a fork of ConEmu so you can add any other consoles that you like and launch them from within Cmder. I've tested it with putty, kitty, Cygwin, babun and all worked fine. Just keep in mind that the keyboard shortcuts of these consoles might collide with Cmder so you might need to do some tweaking here and there.

Chocolatey

If you miss Linux-like package management under Windows then Chocolatey is something you should consider. It has it's own quite wide repository of free tools but also proprietary software. For instance typing choco install doublecmd in your Windows cmd or PowerShell will install Double Commander application. Chocolatey teams up very well with Cmder. You can set up some useful aliases to speed up the Chocolatey usage even more. The only downside is that it's not as fast and smooth as Linux package managers you might be used to. My experience is that searching sometimes takes quite long a time and installing bigger applications is definitely slower than with apt-get or pacman.

But personally, I still prefer to stare a few seconds on the cmd than open up the web browser, find and download a setup file, get blocked by a corporate firewall, then finding some mirror that is not blocked, etc. Please be aware that some corporate firewalls might block Chocolatey or it's repositories as well. In that case, there is not much you can do 🥺. Also if you want to install all the software, you need to run Chocolatey from the elevated command prompt (with admin rights). Depending on the company policy, this might sometimes be an issue. It is nevertheless still possible to install Choco without admin rights (install guide is here) but then you will be able to install only apps that can run in portable mode or apps that do not require admin rights to run (such as Notepad++).

Total commander

I think most of you have already heard about this program. The main feature is the twin pane view and some basic commands you can use to interact with the files and move them from one pane to the other. Although this setup might look a bit archaic, when you learn the shortcuts you'll become a king of the file management. Some people use Windows only because there is no full-fledged Total Commander for Linux. Total Commander has integrated archiver, FTP client, great file comparing features and other tools. All this is very useful for power users who don't want to lose time by constantly clicking around in the windows explorer. You can fast edit text files by hitting F4, copy to the other pane by F5 or quickly create a new folder by F7. You can connect to the remote file system or FTP and very conveniently select and copy/upload files there. If you have never used any similar file manager before it might feel a bit uncomfortable but with practice, you can become very fast and effective. Total commander can be used for free but you have to pass an intro window where you have to click on the right number to continue. Alternatively, you can purchase the license at https://www.ghisler.com/.

Double commander

A very good free alternative to Total Commander. It does not have all the features but you might find it sufficient for your needs. The FTP client is a bit more intuitive in Total commander in my opinion but there are things I like better in doublecmd, especially how the settings are organized. Overall Doublecmd is still highly customizable and runs both under Linux and Windows so you can transfer your experience between the two systems.

My customized doublecmd with different pane colors.

Vivaldi browser

This browser is built by the people that were behind Opera in its early days and it is very customizable. It is easily controlled by keyboard and unlike other browsers allows you to customize shortcuts, create custom search engines and other useful features. I wrote a separate article about it here so I won't go into too many details here. If you want to save time, you can create custom searches to search in the web apps you use every day. The theme, colors and browser layout can be adjusted to your liking as well. On the picture below you can see how I have tabs aligned vertically on the left. Although Vivaldi is based on the open source Chromium it looks nothing like Chrome (with exception of few dialog windows and extensions). This might be a downside if you are not a fan of Chromium-based browsers, but the good thing is that the vast majority of Google Chrome plugins work in Vivaldi.

Vivaldi with a dark theme and vertical tabs

That's it. I hope this article was helpful and will improve your experience while working under Windows. Do you have some other tips? Feel free to share them in the comments 👇.

Note:
I have been a Windows power user for more than 15 years and I still use it at work ( I have to 😅 ). I am also an enthusiastic Linux user for almost 3 years now.

Useful tips for Cmder - Windows command line replacement

mareksamec — Wed, 25 Dec 2019 22:46:52 +0000

Do you think the Windows command line aka CMD would use some more features? Or what's worse, you are used to Linux command line and now you have to work under Windows? Don't lose hope, Cmder can help you out!

There are plenty of good intro articles about Cmder so I will jump right to some of the features that I like the most because they significantly boost my productivity under the Windows environment.

This article will cover the following:

How to reload (source your Cmder config file aka something like .bashrc reload)
How to use command aliases + tips
Using fzf fuzzy search*

Reloading (sourcing) Cmder config files (aliases, profile etc):

This is similar to sourcing a .bashrc file after you edit it. The easy way this is to run the init.bat which is usually located in the vendor folder which can be found in the Cmder root folder. The profile files will be reloaded during the Cmder init. The default location of the profile files is in the config folder. For CMD it is the user_profile.cmd file. Cmder creates windows variable %CMDER_ROOT% which references the Cmder root. You should be able to reload the init script with this command:



%CMDER_ROOT%\vendor\init.bat

In case this would not work for some reason, you can call the script by using its absolute path. Let's say your Cmder is installed in:
C:\Cmder\

Then you can simply call:



 C:\Cmder\vendor\init.bat

It is also very useful to set up an alias for this, do it quickly. The user alias config is usually stored in this path:
%CMDER_ROOT%\config\user_aliases.cmd

Open it in your favorite text editor and add this line:
init=%CMDER_ROOT%\vendor\init.bat

Save the file and restart the Cmder, or call init.bat as shown above. Now, whenever you type "init" in the Cmder command line. All the configs should be reloaded. Keep in mind that if you have two instances (tabs) with Cmder open, the config will be reloaded only in the window where you called the init from.

More alias tips

Alias file works similar to Linux bash aliases but the syntax is a bit different. Simple aliases can be assigned like this:



lt=ls -lstr --color=auto

For commands that include paths (especially when some of the folder\file names have spaces in them) you need to use double quotes like this:



help=cat "%CMDER_ROOT%\config\hotkeys-marek.txt"
gowork=cd "C:\Users\marek\Documents\Work"

The second alias above is a simple cd to my work folder. For the cd command to work properly you need to use double-quotes. When you want to launch some file using let's say Adobe Acrobat which is installed in the Program Files you can do it like this:



fieldman="C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Acrobat Reader DC\Reader\AcroRd32.exe" "C:
    \Users\marek\Documents\Documentation\manuals\field-manual.pdf"

Fast searching with fzf

Yes, fzf can work in Cmder too. You can use it for fast fuzzy command line searches. If you don't know fzf, check the project git here: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf . Windows binaries can be found in the project releases page here: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf-bin/releases.

There are two ways to install the fzf. A simple way is just to copy fzf.exe to the Cmder "bin" folder. You can find this folder in the Cmder root directory e.g. C:\Cmder\bin\ . Every binary in that folder will be automatically added to the Cmder PATH variable. Alternatively, you can download it somewhere else and add the line below to your user_profile.cmd file. Let's say you have cloned the fzf to the Apps directory in your Documents (it is assumed that you have folder fzf there which contains file fzf.exe):



set "PATH=%USERPROFILE%\Documents\Apps\fzf;%PATH%"

For fzf to work the windows TERM variable must not be set. It can be done by simply adding the following line to your profile file:



set TERM=

Keep in mind that unsetting the TERM variable can cause some issues, for instance, if you connect to a remote Linux server via Cmder built-in ssh.

I hope these tips were useful, feel free to add more down in the comments. Stay tuned for more productivity-related articles for both Linux and Windows!