Skip to content

System Crafting

Chitchat
  • @phenomlab Alrighty then, except Iā€™d capitialize Craftingā€¦ lolā€¦

    Cuz, I wonderā€¦ how much time do/have folks hereabouts spent thinking about/experimenting with fonts? šŸ¤” šŸŒ“ šŸŒ“

    Once one has become a disciple of text UIā€™s then the font is not moot! Schnay, schnay, schnay!!

    Bleh, blah, bleepā€¦ I confess that I am picky about my fonts. Presently:

    • I favor the Googā€™s Noto fonts for web, sans, and serif fonts.
    • For monospace text consoles, emacs and browser fonts I favor Camingo Code.

    So there is plenty of thought food therein. Analysis paralysis ahoy! šŸš¢

    Edit: No surprise that an end luser who lives in their text editor would favor a font optimized for text editorsā€¦ Go figureā€¦

  • What, what??

    I await with bated breath discussion of dotted vs. slashed zeros (I mean, seriously, zeros and upper case Oā€™s may be too easily confused otherwise). What about ā€œdog houseā€ gā€™s, eh? Hmmā€¦ šŸ¤” šŸ¤”

    Edit: Uh, no surprise that I really did god house gā€™s? šŸ• šŸŒ“ šŸŒ“

  • @gotwf šŸ˜„ I canā€™t explain the reason I saw ā€œgā€ then suddenly thought it was /g and had visions of you working with AWK and SEDā€¦

  • @phenomlab Been long since I did. Rusty would be an understatement. Cool stuff though. And well recommended for the unix traveler.

    I confess to having a strong bias for slashed zeros. Dot in center is a distant second. Distinctive alpha ā€œlā€™sā€ from numeral ā€œ1ā€™sā€. Backtics, apostrophes, quotes. And, of course, any alpha with a tail on itā€¦ šŸ•

    We got it pretty easy, peasy when it comes to fonts nowadaysā€¦ Both hardware and soft tech wise. Hence tweaking and tuning hinting, et.al. are mostly moot. My fonts OCD is a carry over from the dinosaur days of displaysā€¦ šŸŠ

    Have mercy! šŸ˜±

  • Latency

    Perception is nine tenths of realityā€¦

    https://lwn.net/Articles/751763/

  • @gotwf said in System Crafting:

    Been long since I did. Rusty would be an understatement. Cool stuff though. And well recommended for the unix traveler.

    Yes, I tend to use this a lot more than seems to be feasible lately !

    @gotwf said in System Crafting:

    My fonts OCD is a carry over from the dinosaur days of displaysā€¦

    No, Iā€™m the same. Very choosy with fonts, and they have to look good in all circumstances. KDE is a bit of a PITA as far as font smoothing is concerned, butā€¦

  • @phenomlab Been long time since I used any DE but I would think they would still respect $XDG_HOME/fontconfig/fonts.conf, no? Or maybe Gnome3 over rides it? Hmmā€¦ seem to recall some such nonsenseā€¦ šŸ¤”

    The latest and greatest freetype and opentype engines are great, howsomever, so I am nowadays hard pressed to improve upon the default anti-aliasing, hinting, subpixel alignment, etc. to tweak fonts into looking better. Whereas not too many years ago such was derigeur.

    All else that is left in the chain is hardware side: gpu and display. Iā€™m on a mid range amdgpu and an Eizo main display w/a dot pitch of .23. So that is pretty nice. Not 4K/5K but plenty of K to be a A-Okay with me.

    So from there it pretty much breaks down to subjective stylistic choices: I like slashed zeros but can put up with dotted zeros if the rest of the glyphs trip my triggers. I doubt, however, I could get by without doghouse gā€™s.
    And other stuff like that font side.

  • @gotwf said in System Crafting:

    Eizo main display

    Iā€™ve not heard from EIZO since I used them in the early 2000ā€™s for CRT monitors

    @gotwf said in System Crafting:

    Been long time since I used any DE

    Wait - are you doing literally everything from command line ?

  • @phenomlab said in System Crafting:

    Wait - are you doing literally everything from command line ?

    Click. šŸ’”

    To the extent possible. I use a window manager that is very keybinding centric. Focus on keeping hands/fingers over home row. More efficient when it comes to actually getting things done. Going to mouse is considered a cache miss. Last resort. Excepting web browser. There are some keyboard centric browsers out there but I find I still need one main stream, full bloated enchilada. Hence, I confess to making good use of a trackball to drive firefoxā€¦ But otherwise, yeah, mostly all cli - whatā€™s not to love?

    Else maybe look at it this way: Editor, Terminal, Web Browser. Two out of three are cli driven. Hence my workstation ā€œdesktopā€ is very cli centric.

  • @gotwf admittedly, I do everything server wise via CLI - not a DE in sight. However, Iā€™m not sure I could use CLI for everything as that would defeat the purpose of a DE designed for desktop usage, no ?

  • @phenomlab Wellā€¦ it is complicatedā€¦ My journey is long, not the end all, be all, and likely require a substantial beelog post.

    But yeah, as mentioned in one of my bee log articles I linked to somewhere else hereabouts, the big trifecta are 1) Web browser, 2) Terminal, and 3) Editor. Those last two are all command line driven whilst the fist is predominantly gui/rodent driven. Of course there are some one off apps here and there that are predominantly gui driven but they are not part of my daily fare, used to rarely to be of consequence. So, go figure what percentages of time you may spend in each. Maybe, just maybe, that DE is getting in your way more than accelerating productivity? Just maybeā€¦ maybe not.


Related Topics