Failing at ricing, but not entirely

It has been a while since I wrote about being inspired to start ricing my desktop again. It turns out that having 3 kids and working on the house leaves little time to invest in getting familiar with a new OS and making a pretty desktop.

Some nice things came out of it however; I installed Arch (btw) for the first time and it turns out doing the base install is not as intimidating as I thought. I might say it is easy. Installing all the other things, like a network stack, desktop, sound, etc. does seem a little harder. At least it takes a lot of reading and making choices.

After realizing I could not or did not want to invest the time at that moment I installed Fedora, installed my dotfiles and went on with my day.

A couple of weeks later I got the idea to improve my workflow after watching the Primagen explaining his setup. Basically, he wants to go navigate everywhere with one key press.

At this point in time I was cmd-tabbing (or super-tabbing) my way around apps (mostly a browser and a terminal). It works, but can be annoying when having multiple apps open and tabbing too far, landing on the wrong application.

So I made a plan. I wanted a fixed number of workspaces where each workspace has a single function: workspace 1 is for the browser, workspace 2 for the terminal, workspace 3 for e-mail and workspace 4 for whatever else I need.

MacOS and Gnome both have workspaces but I do not like the default key bindings for managing and navigating them. I tried using the MacOS key bindings for workspaces but quickly found out it was unusable. It is not possible to disable the animations for workspace switching and when the animation is running you can't switch workspaces again, limiting the speed at which I can navigate around.

After some searching around the web I found some tiling window managers for MacOS. I decided to give Aerospace a try and after some fiddling around with the config I landed on a solution that worked for me. I configured four workspaces: U, I, O and P. Why those? Because they sit right above my right hand above the home row and are easily accessible. So now I can hit alt+u to switch to my browser and alt+i to switch to my terminal. Much quicker than cmd-tabbing.

With my MacOS setup dialed in I went to check if I could configure Gnome with exactly the same key bindings and, lo and behold, I could. However, to make switching in Gnome feel snappy I had to disable animations, otherwise switching workspaces is too slow for my liking.

So now both my MacOS device and Gnome devices work exactly the same, except the ctrl vs cmd thing. But that is something I can live with.

I am a bit sad that my setup isn't as nice as Pewdiepie's Hyprland setup, but it sure as hell is functional and easy to set up.