this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2025
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Just wondering since I know a lot of people quietly use a screen-area-select -> tesseract OCR -> clipboard shortcut.

  • I separate subjects of interest into different Firefox windows, in different workspaces -- so I have an extension title them and a startup script parse text to ask the compositor to put them in the correct workspace (lets me restart more conveniently).
  • I have automatically-set different-orientation wallpapers for using my 2-in-1 depending on whether I use it in portrait or landscape (kind of just for looks, but I don't think if anyone else adds a wallpaper change to their screen rotation keybind).
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[–] mlg 1 points 10 minutes ago

I'm using XFCE with Compiz, and since I have two monitors I have a 3D octagon instead of a 3D cube desktop.

[–] tanisnikana 3 points 46 minutes ago

My applications menu icon (or the “start” menu for the philistines) is a 🐢.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 20 minutes ago

I use this app (webapps is the name I think) to make apps for YouTube, Mubi and TorrentLeech and I have then pinned on the task bar and use them as apps instead of webpages. This is in my hometheater pc

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 hour ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 hour ago

That's sick man! Get some help!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

I made a user for my partner

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

I also have a user for your partner

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Haha!

Take my poor man's gold

🏅

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Coming from Windows, I set up KDE's Spectacle to open with Super + Shift + S in Area Select Mode and save and copy to clipboard on click release

Maybe not as unique but kinda neat I think

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

Not unique, but we are now kindred (I did the same <:)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] friend_of_satan 3 points 4 hours ago

I have the same type of thing. An alias that creates a tempdir that is based on the date, then cd's into it. Then a cron job that finds dirs that are older then N days old and deletes them. I use these for most of my scratch work. Having several days to look back at what you did and know when you did it is so nice.

[–] nycki 6 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

I have Syncthing set up to copy save data between my pc and steam deck, but not just for emulator stuff: its got my entire modded minecraft directory and my balatro modloader nn there too.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 hours ago

Syncthing is great and incredibly easy to use. I have mine set to sync my Obsidian notes so I don't have to pay for the official service.

I have tried multiple different open source note apps that offer free local sync, but I can't find anything I like. It frustrates me because I love open source.

[–] nycki 3 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

wait how does your clipboard shortcut work op? that sounds nifty!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

I think I mentioned it but here it is again in case the comment didnt federate

click to enlarge

# snippet based on end4 dotfiles -- FIXME edge case where a
#     preexisting tmp.png might be overwritten
# English
bind = Super+Shift,T,exec,grim -g "$(slurp $SLURP_ARGS)" "tmp.png" && tesseract -l eng "tmp.png" - | wl-copy && rm "tmp.png"
# Korean
bind = Super+Shift,K,exec,grim -g "$(slurp $SLURP_ARGS)" "tmp.png" && tesseract -l kor "tmp.png" - | wl-copy && rm "tmp.png"
# Japanese
bind = Super+Shift,J,exec,grim -g "$(slurp $SLURP_ARGS)" "tmp.png" && tesseract -l jpn "tmp.png" - | wl-copy && rm "tmp.png"

Pipe grim and slurp (selects part of the Wayland screen then copies) into a tmp.png, tesseract it into the clipboard, then delete the tmp.png. Has like 1 sec of lag tho :]

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 hours ago

why do you even need a temporary file?

$ slurp | grim -g - - | tesseract stdin stdout -l eng+kor+jpn | wl-copy -t 'text/plain'
[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

I type "power..." into my cli and press tab+enter to shutdown my computer. Same for reboot... 😆

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago

Because its fast and easy? And also it works regardless of what DE/WM I am using.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 12 hours ago

In all my servers I still have a cron->make routine running. It's a hold-over from 20 years ago and the state of IaC back then, and it's made its way onto every server I manage because it is simple and effective.

And it still does its job. 8 major RHEL releases later, and the thing it needs to do, it does.

Lennart would build 3 new daemons and link them all into dbus, I'm sure.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

Uh this sounds awesome, care to share?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 hours ago

Uh I would be interested in that actually! Nowadays Youtube generates lots of problems with freetube due to their cookie bullshit and I feel with mpv(yt-dlp) in cli I at least have the option to see whats going on.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 18 hours ago

the ability to use two Bluetooth dongles simultaneously, each for one device. try that on Microsoft's clown os and see how pressing the gamepad triggers makes the bluetooth headphones chop up the sound 😂

[–] Scott_of_the_Arctic 3 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

I spilled a glass of scrumpy on the keyboard and a, s, and d no longer work. So I have to use a keyboard with it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

So you have to use a keyboard with your keyboard...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 20 hours ago

The text editor shortcut on my taskbar runs a sort of autosave script in ~/.drafts. I wanted my text editor to function more like the one on my phone so I can just jot down random thoughts without going through the whole ritual of naming and saving. It creates YYYYMMDD_text in ~/.drafts (or YYYYMMDD_text_1 etc. if it already exists) and launches Pluma, which I also have configured to autosave every 10 minutes.

The other thing extends beyond Linux itself a bit. I like to joke that I have the most secure NT 4 / Windows 95 lookalike ever put together. Aside from the encrypted and hardened Debian base (/boot is also encrypted), I was in part inspired by Apple's parts pairing (yikes!). So my coreboot is configured to only accept my boot disk. If it's swapped out or missing, or if I want to boot something else, it will ask for a password. In the unlikely event my machine gets stolen, the thief must at a minimum reflash the BIOS or replace the motherboard to make it useful again. Idk, it amuses me every time I think about it.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago

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>: "[email protected]" # 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.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

I have been using the same userctl alias.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

I didn't know about the systemd-run command. Do you use it to save the command log? I created a script conveniently named x which opens a file in a default app, in the background, so I can still use the terminal. But then I had the problem with handling logs and this sounds like a perfect solution. Gonna try it today.

As for the alias, I wanted to create a pacman-like interface for systemctl, so the commands would be much shorter, but never finished it. For example, sctl -Eun unit would be equal to sysyemctl enable --user --now unit

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 hours ago

The logs are handled, but I mostly use it for command separation and control, including killing unruly child processes.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 day ago

I'm one of at most a handful people in the world with a full disk encrypted Steam Deck and unlocking using the touchscreen.

Until someone implements https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/issues/464 in Bazzite.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago
  • I have bash scripts light and dark that make dbus calls to set my global theme to light or dark mode. I switch between them regularly, and opening system settings and pressing a button is too inconvenient.

Your first one sounds similar to me though - I use activity-aware Firefox to separate my personal and work accounts on my personal and work plasma activities.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 minutes ago
[–] eager_eagle 30 points 1 day ago (1 children)

an actual print screen, finally

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago

A kind of ‘super’ print screen, in fact.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

I created my own openSUSE splash screen for KDE because I felt all the existing ones were a bit amateur and I wanted something professional looking. I haven’t published it because I can’t be bothered creating an account. It only took about 15 minutes because I chopped up another one which had clearly chopped up another one.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago

CTRL+SHIFT+L to sync my room lights to the screen using huenicorn. Plan on hooking up openrgb as well when I can be bothered to write a script.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I boot on a custom EFI app to control my dualboot (instead of systemd-boot or grub) that asks a service on my proxmox server which OS I'm supposed to boot.

Overkill, but it allows me to control my dual-boot without a keyboard in my computer (because it's a Bluetooth keyboard so I can't really use it in grub anyway)

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 day ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Some people use plasma because they like how configurable it is. I do like that, but I'm also drawn to it because of its great defaults.

The main ways I change it are setting my background (on my work activity I have it selecting from various company related backgrounds while on my personal activity it uses a selection of my favourites of my own photos) and adjusting the bottom panel.

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