Have you looked at KISS? Extremely lightweight and customizable. You can go from the most minimalist approach with text only and selection of apps to show to crash things like visual effects and icons for every single installed app.
We’re exactly on the same page: “the tool is not the goal”. The only difference may be that I see chosing options for an app as options for a tool. If I want to cut wood or metal I need a different saw. Even though the tool is basically the same it doesn’t serve the same purpose. Hence I configure options once and for all, like I would consider which hardware I need exactly in terms of use, ergonomic, power… before buying it.
I don’t spend time tweaking the look of a tool because it’s doesn’t fit my approach of things anymore. As such I don’t even use a DE. But I feel the need to build the right tool (i.e. system app) I need to perform a job as efficiently as possible while keeping the tool itself minimalist and as invisible as possible. On my daily use I have tools that I couldn’t live without anymore but if you ask me a list I will either forgot them or put them at the bottom because I will not think about them right away since they became a second nature.
I certainly see the comfort of the out of the box approach and it can serve a lot of people. In my use case I just realize that - using the example above - it could be like using a wood saw on metal in some cases. It may work but not as good as you would expect to have the job done properly. Also, the fit them all approach means building an app with tons of options activated and I prefer to have available to me only the options I really need. The philosophy feels less bloated to me and I’m not overloading my system with stuff I’ll never use. It’s more time consuming at first to chose the right app but with time it became quick enough and it definitely save me way more time in the long run when I use my system.
Thanks for this feedback, it helps me feel a little bit less stupid :) With everything setup in NixOS documentation for neovim in appearance I thought really dumb to not be able to have it worked.
Using the approach proposed by @flashgnash (i.e. using lazy.vim) let me install neovim and all my plugins.
OP has solved his issue already but the trick I mentioned could be due to a capacitor issue which can occur anytime and break things that worked before.
I was just trying to help by suggesting an approach that solved the exact same issue on others’ laptop running the same distro. Even though not convenient you can either wait for your battery to run out or disconnect it to try this trick.
When Wayland is eventually ready, I will personaly look into river. At least that’s what I would do now but no doubts that by the time everybody move to Wayland there will be way more options to consider. Hopefully one will be a good replacement for bspwm.
If you’re using only one monitor, simply duplicate and scale your laptop screen instead of using the extended approach.
To give you a rough idea, this will look to something like this: xrandr --output eDP1 --mode 1366x768 --scale 1x1 --output HDMI1 --same-as eDP1 --mode 1920x1080 --scale 0.711x0.711
Use xrandr to find the monitors names and resolution. The scale option is simply the ratio between your 2 resolutions.
Don’t know if you plan to use another Arch-based distro on this laptop in the future but I came across this page which has some tips to adjust the Framework 13 including one that may be related to what you mention. They recommend to use 1,5 scaling factor. More details can be found here.
Thanks for sharing. I’ve not been sold by the info on their website. Too many details are missing. At a glance, privacy concerns seem better addressed by librewolf. Also there have been some issues in update history cycles and some reviews (which I won’t cite here with respect to project) didn’t help in building confidence.
Thanks for the feedback. I’m used to packer but it’s not maintained anymore so may be a good time to switch to lazy.
I’ll see if I can have it work in NixOS.