I use my DE mostly as it comes, that’s got to be unique in this community

I have an old gamer keyboard with extra programmable keys on the side, which I use for cut, copy, paste, close tab, close window, etc. Logitech provides drivers/software for Windows & Mac only.

To make it work I have a custom monkey-patched USB driver that I compiled from source, some weird daemon that interacts with the driver and some shell scripts on top of that. I’m not sure how but it works thanks to a 9 year old youtube video made by a guy from eastern europe somewhere.

Machined badge reading “Built Not Bought”.

My dad used to put them on the cars he built.

I use KDE’s defaults.

When I press Super + PrtSc, a bash script performs the following:

Takes a screenshot of the entire desktop (import -window root) and saves it as ~/screenshot.png…

Analyzes the screenshot to calculate the “mean brightness” value of the image. It converts the image to grayscale and determines the average pixel brightness (a value between 0 and 1, where 0 is black and 1 is white).

Checks if the image is dark by comparing the mean brightness to a threshold of 0.2. If the mean brightness is less than 0.2 (i.e., the image is very dark), it applies a negative filter to the image (convert -negate), effectively inverting the colors (black becomes white and vice versa).

Sends the image to a printer (lp command) named MF741C-743C for printing.

I made a user for my partner

While I doubt the concept is unique, the script is: a keyboard shortcut will check the clipboard for a YouTube link and then show launcher options for mpv or yt-dlp, including launch arguments for lower quality format and audio only. It launches that in a terminal for easier handling when yt-dlp doesn’t work properly (much more common if using proxies, but also if a video is age-restricted or deleted).

So when I see a yt link here, I can just copy it, keyboard shortcut and then it’s playing in my local video player.

edit: here’s the script. It assumes xsel (clipboard access), rofi (menu creator), gnome-terminal (terminal) and notify-send (system notification on failure) are installed and working, you’ll need to replace any which don’t match your system. My DE just runs it in bash when the shortcut is entered.

#!/bin/bash

ARR=()
ARR+=("mpv full")
ARR+=("mpv medium")
ARR+=("yt-dlp")

NORMAL_URL=`xsel -ob | sed -r "s/.*(v=|\/)([a-zA-Z0-9_-]{11}).*/https:\/\/youtube.com\/watch?v=\2/"`

CHOICE=$(printf '%s\n' "${ARR[@]}" | rofi -dmenu -p "mpv + yt-dlp from clipboard")
DOWNLOAD="false"
MPV="false"
OPTIONS=""

if [ "$CHOICE" = "mpv full" ]; then
	MPV="true"
fi

if [ "$CHOICE" = "mpv medium" ]; then
	MPV="true"
	OPTIONS+="'--ytdl-format=bv*[height<721]+ba' "
fi

if [ "$CHOICE" = "yt-dlp" ]; then
	DOWNLOAD="true"
fi

if [ $MPV == "true" ]; then
	COMMAND="mpv $OPTIONS $NORMAL_URL"
	gnome-terminal --title "$NORMAL_URL" -- bash -c "echo $COMMAND;$COMMAND;if [ \$? -ne 0 ]; then notify-send 'yt-dlp failed' $NORMAL_URL; bash; fi;"
elif [ $DOWNLOAD == "true" ]; then
	COMMAND="yt-dlp $OPTIONS $NORMAL_URL"
        gnome-terminal --title "$NORMAL_URL" -- bash -c "echo $COMMAND;$COMMAND;if [ \$? -ne 0 ]; then notify-send 'yt-dlp failed' $NORMAL_URL; bash; fi;"
fi

I am indecisive when it comes to wallpapers so I have a script somewhere which accepts tag-words as arguments and then scrapes wallhaven.cc for those words at the resolution of my setup and picks one that contains those words at random before downloading it to my wallpapers folder and setting it as my wallpaper image.

So for example, you could just know you want something blue so you would run wallpaper blue and it just grabs one and sets it. You could get a wallpaper of the sky, of a blue car, of the ocean, whatever happens to be a wallpaper that met the criteria of the word/s supplied.

I have scripts set up to switch between my desk setup and my home theater setup that swap monitor configurations with wlrandr and default audio devices in wireplumber. These scripts are triggered with the “Netflix” button on my Nvidia Shield remote via Home Assistant and SSH. Simultaneously on Home Assistant power to the peripherals on my desk is toggled, the TV input is toggled between the Nvidia Shield and the PC, my AV receiver settings are toggled, and if the PC was asleep, it’s turned on with a WoL magic packet.

I suspect my habit of having an alias userctl="systemctl --user" is slightly unusual, as is running Firefox, Steam, and some other graphical programs as systemd units is somewhat unusual (e.g. mod4-enter runs systemd-run --user alacritty)

But what I’m actually pretty sure is unique is my keyboard layout. I taught myself dvorak a summer some decades ago, but the norwegian dvorak layout has some annoyances, so I’ve made some tweaks. Used to be a Xmodmap file, but with the switch to wayland I turned it into a file in /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/.

Part of what I did to teach myself dvorak and touch-typing at the same time was randomize the placement of the keycaps too. It has a side effect of being a kind of security by obscurity layer: I type quickly and confidently, but others who want to use my machines have an “uhh …” reaction.

Small thing, but I really like it: I have ~/autoclean_tmp directory on most of the hosts I use as a desktop. Then on crontab I have a find-command which automatically deletes files which are 7 days or older. I can throw stuff I download from the internet and copy from other hosts, random text files when setting up new stuff and so on in there and they just vanish after a while.

I have two mice, one for either hand, and use xinput to flip the buttons on JUST the left one. It’s actually one of the main things keeping me from moving to Wayland, which doesn’t seem to have the same configuration features

I use compose key sequences to save time writing out long email addresses. For example, I have something like this in my ~/.XCompose:

<Multi_key> <b> <o> <s> <at>: "myangryboss@company.com" # Email of my very angry boss

So I can just type Compose (right alt on my system), bos@ and get his email address. Less error prone than typing out emails manually.

I’m probably not the only one to use compose strings as a replacement to a text expander, but I don’t know anyone else who does this.

Maybe a bit plain since I’m only at mediocre level in my Linux journey, but I use my favorite fonts for Kitty. Recursive Mono Linear and then for italics and comments in neovim I use Recursive Mono Casual Italic.

Recursive Linear is so tidy and neat, with just the lightest touch of personality. And Casual keeps that style but tweaks it just ever so slightly to a more comic. And they have sans versions of both as well for everything else.

I also made my own Starship prompt to match my desktop. It runs an easily reconfigurable color palette and uses color coded chevrons to denote different git statuses.

Does stuff I wrote myself count?

Apache server that has a bunch of webpages that are all configured by simple JSON files and loaded by PHP. The pages have buttons on them which when pressed enter macros. So I push “Deploy Landing Gear” and Shift+alt+F8 or some obscure as fuck combination no one would ever use normally gets pressed and the game can be set to use that keybind. Most of it is for simple immediate key presses but also made a few for macros as well.

The HTML/PHP that runs the show is a grand total of 2018 bytes, including comments. Plus a fairly bloated 2444 byte CSS file that includes some button colour options that I never use now because I decided they look ugly. Should update some of the background images though, my sheet steel Faulcon DeLacy logo looks a bit basic.