For those who are unfamiliar, “ricing” is a small but interesting (to me anyway) *nix sub-culture. These are folks who focus on transforming lower resource environments into works of art, beauty, and efficient work-flow. Most typically, they focus on tiling window manager (twm) environments although there is also regular interest in Openbox and less frequently Fluxbox (stacking window manager ~ swm). Occasionally, you may encounter efforts focused on addressing heavier Desktop Environments (DEs) such as gnome, cinnamon, KDE, etc.
For more detailed insight, please read:
By way of full disclosure, I may be one of the older ‘ricers’. If you meander this site, you will see many of my ricing efforts (although they are not often described via that term.) My special interests involve using Debian (MX & antiX) and arch (ArchLabs & manjaro) based distros. Distros such as Void, Gentoo, and KISS are interesting to me but I simply do not have enough time to become proficient in their use. The window managers I enjoy most are:
- bspwm #1 (by a long shot)
- hlwm (HerbstluftWM)
- Openbox
N.B.: I do not really spend much time ricing my xfce4 desktop.
In the past, I have, also, played around with:
- iceWM
- fluxbox
- jwm
If you are among those who might be interested in improving the look & feel of your desktop, while improving its performance, here are some clues as to how-to begin.
- Know that most of the windowm manager tweaks are published via items called ‘dotfiles’.
- Most people store and share their dotfiles on github & gitlab (I happen to use both).
- A wonderful place to view & share ricing efforts may be found on Reddit in the subgroup called unixporn.
If you want to become quickly acquainted with one of the premier ‘ricers’ check his (addy’s) work out:
- https://github.com/addy-dclxvi/almighty-dotfiles
- https://www.joyk.com/dig/detail/50291
My dotfiles may be accessed here:
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