Heyy what’s up
Nah man, I did some code but nobody replied to my questions in the git issue conversation, so I got frustrated and just stopped coding.
Anyways, I also switched to a dynamic tiling window manager: i3. It’s the one officially supported. If you manage to install rofi, you can almost do everything of qubes related things keyboard driven. i made a post of my rofi config for qubes and in another post i showed my i3 desktop, looks nice to me.
I also switched to a keyboard with a trackpoint, like the Thinkpad ones. My keyboard is a Tex Shura and it feels great. You only need 1 week forcing yourself to use it to get used to it. Using a good trackpoint is definetely a game changer.
If you ever buy one of these, you will probably need to do a little tweak in the USB Guard of Qubes OS so it does not get blocked in the LUKS prompt (easy to fix tho, this happens because the keyboard contains a mass storage device embedded inside that you can use to create custom macros and shit like that).
Cool shortcuts for firefox i use a lot:
Ctrl+W close tab
Ctrl+T creates tab
Ctrl+L edit url path
Ctrl+R reload
Ctrl+Shift+R reload and refresh cache i think
Ctrl+Tab go to next tab
Ctrl+Shift+Tab go to previous tab
Alt+Left go to previous page
Alt+Right got to the next page (inverse of Alt+Left)
Btw if you feel brave, you should try out yazi, is a file manager fully keyboard driven. I may post some shit to do qvm-copy-to-vm automatically from there without needing to spawn a terminal to type that command.
If you switch to Qubes OS with i3, follow the install guidelines of i3.
Then install
- A notification daemon (i use dunst). This is non negotiable, you will need this, internal tooling of Qubes OS breaks if it can’t send notifications, like for example Qubes Video Companion.
- An app launcher. I use rofi. You could live without this, but it will make your UX infinetely worse. Btw, you are meant to customize it, rofi by itself sucks. a template i made can be found here: HOW-TO: Rofi - XFCE-like menu i should update it tho
- Customize your i3 to add custom keybinds for everything: Screenshots for example
- Improve existing keybinds: Ctrl+Shift+C for copy to the global clipboard feels bad for me, as it makes impossible to copy from terminal. I use Win+C instead. Same for Global Clipboard paste
- A wallpaper process like feh, or a custom solution. I use a custom solution to have a terminal as a wallpaper running a cmatrix
- Then, make UI decision that ease up your life. I have color blindness (apart from the carpal tunnel), so I set window borders in colour tones that i won’t mistake (yeah, I am a fucking disgrace of human being lol). And
- Last step, make it look cool as fuck so we don’t go back to macOS How long did it take you to get used to Qubes? - #31 by tnt
Now you should be able to do almost everything with keyboard with no dependency-errors in qubes os. all dependencies i mentioned can be installed with sudo qubes-dom0-update, so it should be easy to set up. Hardest part is customizing your actual desktop, which can take you 1-2 weeks.
I mean, deep inside, I fucking love macOS UX/UI decisions, but being able to fully keyboard-drive my computer with a nice looking UI feels fucking great man.
If one day I have some spare time not fucking wasted in being miserable I may end up posting a tutorial of i3 with Qubes OS to fully keyboard control your computer without the need of a mouse.