Linux Desktop Tips Jun 20, 2019

Over time I have accumulated a number of tricks and hacks that make “linux desktop” more natural for me. Today I’ve discovered another one: a way to minimize Firefox on close. This seems like a good occasion to write about things I’ve been doing!

Window Switching

I’ve never understood the appeal of multiple desktops, tiling window managers, or Mac style “full screen window is outside of your desktop”. They for sure let you to neatly organize several applications at once, but I never need an overview of all applications. What I need most of the time is switching to a specific application, like a browser.

Windows has a feature for this, that fits this workflow perfectly. If you pin an application to start menu, then win + number will launch or focus that app. That is, if the app is already running, its window will be raised and focused.

For some reason, this is not available out of the box in any of the Linux window managers I’ve tried. What is easy is binding launching an application to a shortcut, but I rarely use more than once instance of Firefox!

Luckily, jumpapp is exactly what is needed to implement this properly.

I use Xbindkeys for global shortcuts, with the following config:

~/.xbindkeysrc

"jumpapp -m kitty"
  F1

"jumpapp -m firefox"
  F2

"jumpapp -m code"
  F3

Note that I bind F? keys without any modifiers: these keys are rarely used by applications and are very convenient for personal use.

Drop Down Terminal

I’ve always liked Quake-style terminals, which you can bring to front with a single keypress. For this reason, I was stuck with yakuake for a really long time.

jumpapp allows me to use any terminal in this fashion, so now I use full screen kitty.

Window Tiling

Because switching windows/applications is easy for me, I typically look at a single maximized window. However, sometimes I like to have two windows side-by-side, for example an editor and a browser with preview. A full blown tiling window manager will be an overkill for this use-case, but another Windows feature comes in handy. In Windows, Win + ← and Win + → tiles active window to the left and right side of the screen. Luckily, this is a built in feature in most window managers, including KWin and Openbox (the two I use the most).

Screen Real Estate

This one is tricky! On one hand, because I use one maximized window at a time, I feel comfortable with smaller displays. I was even disappointed with a purchase of external display for my laptop: turns out, bigger screen doesn’t really help me! On the other hand, I really like when all pixels I have are utilized fully.

I’ve tried to work in full screen windows, but that wasn’t very convenient for two reasons:

Tray area is useful for current time, other status information, and notifications.
Full screen doesn’t play well with jumpapp window switching.

After some experiments, I’ve settled with the following setup:

Use of maximized, but not full screen windows.
When window is maximized, its borders and title bar are hidden. To do this in kwin add the following to ~/.config/kwinrc:
```
[Windows]
BorderlessMaximizedWindows=true
```
To still have an ability to close/minimize the window with the mouse, I use Active Window Menu Plasmoid. What it does is that it packs window title and close/maximize/minimize buttons into the desktop panel, without spending extra pixels:

Another thing I’ve noticed is that I look to the bottom side of the screen much more often. For this reason, I move desktop panel to the top. You can imagine how inconvenient Mac’s dock is for me: it wastes so many pixels in the most important area of the display :-)

Keybindings

After several years of using Emacs and a number of short detours into Vim-land, I grew a profound dislike for the arrow keys. It’s not that they make me slower: they distract me because I need to think about moving my hands.

For the long time I’ve tried to banish arrow keys from my life by making every application understand ctrl+b, ctrl+f and the like. But that was always a whack-a-mole game without a chance to win.

A much better approach is Home Row Computing. I rebind, on the low level, CapsLock + i/j/k/l to arrow keys. This works in every app. It also works with alt and shift modifiers.

I use xkbcomp with this config to set this up. I have no idea how this actually works :-)

File Organization

I used to pile up everything on the desktop. But now my desktop is completely empty, and I enjoy uncluttered view of The Hunters in the Snow every time I boot my laptop.

The trick is to realize that accreting “junk” files is totally normal, and “just don’t put garbage on desktop” is not a solution. Instead, one can create a dedicated place for hoarding.

I have two of those:

~/downloads which I remove automatically on every reboot
~/tmp which I rm -fr ~/tmp manually once in a while

Shell

I used to use Zsh with a bunch of plugins, hoping that I’ll learn bash this way. I still google “How to if in bash?” every single time though.

For this reason, I’ve switched to fish with mostly default config. The killer feature for me is autosuggestions: completion of the commands based on the history. Zsh has something similar, via a plugin, but this crucial feature works in fish out of the box.

One slightly non-standard thing I do is a two-line prompt that looks like this:

02:43:39|~/.config
λ

Two line prompts are great! You can always see a full working directory, and commands are always visually in the same place. Having current time in the prompt is also useful in case you run a long command and forget to time it.

Minimizing Firefox

Finally, the direct cause of this post!

I don’t use a lot of desktop apps, but I keep a browser with at least five tabs for different messaging apps. By the way, Tree Style Tab is the best tool for taming modern “apps”!

The problem with this is that I automatically Alt+F4 Firefox once I am done with it, but launching it every time is slow. Ideally, I want to minimize it on close, just how I do with qBittorrent and Telegram. Unfortunately, there’s no built-in feature for this in Firefox.

I once tried to build it with Xbindkeys and Xdotool. The idea was to intercept Alt+F4 and minize active window if it is Firefox. That didn’t work too well: to close all other applications, I tried to forward Alt+F4, but that recursed badly :-)

Luckily, today I’ve realized that I can write a KWin script for this! This turned out to be much harder than anticipated, because the docs are thin and setup is fiddly.

This post was instrumental for me to figure this stuff out. Thanks Chris!

I’ve created two files:

~/.local/share/kwin/scripts/SmartCloseWindow/metadata.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Smart Close Window
Comment=
Icon=preferences-system-windows-script-test

Type=Service

X-Plasma-API=javascript
X-Plasma-MainScript=code/main.js
X-KDE-ServiceTypes=KWin/Script

X-KDE-PluginInfo-Name=SmartCloseWindow # Note, the same name as the dir
X-KDE-PluginInfo-Author=matklad
X-KDE-PluginInfo-Email=...
X-KDE-PluginInfo-License=GPL
X-KDE-PluginInfo-Version=3

~/.local/share/kwin/scripts/SmartCloseWindow/contents/code/main.js

registerShortcut("Smart Close Window.",
    "Smart Close Window.",
    "alt+f4",
    function () {
        var c = workspace.activeClient;
        if (c.caption.indexOf("Firefox") == -1) {
            c.closeWindow();
        } else {
            c.minimized = true;
        }
    });

After than, I’ve ticked a box in front of Smart Close Window in System Settings › Window Management › KWin Scripts and added a shortcut in System Settings › Shortcuts › Global Shortcuts › System Settings. The last step took a while fo figure out: although it looks like we set shortcut in the script itself, this doesn’t actually work for some reason.

Linux Distribution

Finally, my life has become significancy easier since I’ve settled on NixOS. I had mainly used Arch and a bit of Ubuntu before, but NixOS is so much easier to control. I highly recommend to check it out!

My Dotfiles

Most of the stuff in this post is codified in my config repo: https://github.com/matklad/config.