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Upgrades and Fixes

Recently I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.10 and while I was pretty surprised things went relatively smoothly, things still broke. The most noticeable thing that broke was the gnome-panel. It actually didn't "break", but simply didn't continue to work as nicely with StumpWM, so in my mind, that is broken. This has take up a large amount of small moments where I try to find a solution, quickly forgetting what I was doing in the first place.

My Resolution then is to go ahead and drop Gnome. Instead I'll try to only use StumpWM and some select tools to make life easier. Trayer is one such tool and Thunar is another. Hopefully I'll find some others.

One tool that I wished I had was an application folder like in OS X. Most people (including myself) use things like quicksilver or a launch bar to run applications. When you are using Linux and your distro often installs ton of applications that you don't even know what they do. Needless to say, every once in a while it is fun to click things in the application menu to see what you find.

With this ridiculous use case in my head, I took a glance at creating a quick web UI using a PyGTK and WebKit. Looking through a tutorial or two, it became clear that this was something that I wouldn't use very often, so spending the time learning it just didn't make sense. In fact, it didn't make much sense to have a GUI at all since the majority of the time I'm in or near a command line. With that in mind, it seemed fun to create a command line tool to browse the available applications and see what wa s available. Some basic features I had in mind was searching the diff erent categories and automatically running it. Essentially like a command line quicksilver.

I began looking around to see where the heck all those menus get generated and came up all the Freedesktop specs. I started writing some code as I read how the menus should be constructed and quickly became overwhelmed. Things didn't correlate with the menu I was used to. Eventually, I made a breakthrough and saw the default application directory and was in business. My basic task to print all the names and commands for all the entries in the menu was step one and it ended up being the last step.

At that point I looked at the list and realized that I was pretty much done. If I want to search the list there is grep. If I want to try and start some application based on the result, I can either just type it in or pipe it some other helpful program. With a simple listing of application names, categories and executables, I had finished w hat I set out thanks to the power of the command line. What's more, I wrote a bare minimum of code and have actually found it to be useful.

This is the kind of experience I really love. It is great to write a solution to a problem that works and is incredibly simple. A part of me regrets that I didn't come up with a slick new UI concept or something else that might put my name on the programmer landscape, but in the end I'm really OK with that. It is definitely more rewarding to set a small goal and complete it than to set a lofty one and have a constant reminder sitting around your filesystem.

As for going all StumpWM all the time, we'll see how things pan out. One negative that I've found is that it is next to impossible to really use my computer without two hands. But, honestly, other than clicking to another workspace and using a browser there wasn't much I could do anyway without some dedication to the keyboard. I think that overall it is a pretty healthy co nstraint for me.

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