From time to time, I feel like tweaking my CTWM configuration file for Linux. What I have is delightfully old school — big borders, sharp corners, window buttons that look like they’re out of the 1980s. (That’s not far off.) “Industrial brutalism,” I called it.
Maybe I should add a Conky? I thought. Conky is a system monitoring tool for Linux, tells you the stresses on the CPU, monitors your internet up-and-down, that sort of thing.
Yeah, I’m not feeling that.
It’s an old configuration I found on GNOME-look that was written specifically for Mint. I made a few tweaks — changed the colors and the text size, wired it up to my system’s specific settings, that sort of thing — but it just doesn’t fit with the retro brutalism aesthetic.
Sorry, Conky. It’s me, not you.
What about desktop icons?
That was something I had configured but turned off in my configuration file, and I was curious to see how they actually worked.
I’m not feeling this, either.
The icons aren’t shortcuts to programs or documents. They are miniaturized programs. Instead of minimizing a window to the taskbar, it gets minimized to an icon on the screen, and that icon only appears on the workspace where it was miniaturized. Which is an interesting feature, if maybe not a useful feature; when you have eight workspaces, there’s never a need to miniaturize a program when you can just go to another workspace and open a file or application there. Abd, more frustratingly, a miniaturized program disappears from the workspace view — the stack of colored blocks at the right — which could make it difficult to find a program that you’ve miniaturized, as you’d have to go from workspace to workspace. In short, the best practice (from my POV) seems to be: use workspaces or use icons, but don’t use both.
So, I think both of these projects are going back into the box. I won’t uninstall Conky, but I also won’t launch it from CTWM. And the icons are turned off easily enough in the configuration file.
Sometimes, you have to experiment! You don’t know what you don’t want until you see it in action and know you don’t want it. 🙂