Into.the.Void.

2 years ago I had written a post about handling right clicks on a macbook running linux. Along with changing my window manager of choice, I think I’ve found a better/more elegant solution to that problem.

On my computer’s workspaces one will normally find one or two browser windows open, some instant messaging applications (skype,pidgin), an mp3 player (audacious2) and terminals. Lots of them. I need them to ssh to the servers I monitor/administer and for coding (with vim of course!). I even use one for my email client (mutt). So I need my terminals to be as efficient as possible. After many trials over the years I’ve decided on using urxvt as my terminal of choice.

About a month ago I gave awesome a try and since then it’s been my window manager of choice instead of fluxbox. The reason behind this is mostly fluxbox’s inability to tile terminal (call me urxvt) windows efficiently while changing resolutions. I mostly use my laptop with an external 23” monitor but I wanted to be able to tile my terminals independently of using only my laptop’s screen or both laptop’s and the external one. In fluxbox you can make a window appear on specific area of the screen, so I could open 3-4 terminals on a specific workspace/monitor. Resizing though one of them to fit some monitoring program more efficiently didn’t resize the others ‘automagically’ as well. So, I had to manually resize all open windows of that workspace. Yes, this is horrible from a usability point of view, luckily I didn’t have to do it that frequently. So, I gave awesome a try for its tiling features. I really miss though fluxbox’s tabbing features that I constantly used along with it’s amazing keybindings flexibility (Rant: isn’t it stupid that you have to write your keybindings in lua for awesome and in haskell for xmonad ?) but the tiling capabilities of awesome are currently more important to me.

So while my previous solution for right clicking without a mouse worked pretty well for fluxbox, in my new awesome world I’ve replaced it with xautomation tools. First of all, one needs to install xautomation tools

aptitude install xautomation

Then find clientbuttons configuration part in the default ~/.config/awesome/rc.lua and add this line to it:

awful.button({ modkey }, 2, function () awful.util.spawn("xte 'mouseclick 3'") end)

restart awesome and try modkey + 3 finger tap on your touchpad. You should be seeing a right click “menu”.
If you don’t know what 3 finger tap is or how to configure it, read the 2009 article.

That’s it, no more xbindkeys + xvkbd for awesome.

Filed by kargig at 22:38 under Linux
Tags: awesome, debian, fluxbox, keyboard, Linux, lua, macbook, mouse, right-click, tiling, xautomation, xbindkeys, xte, xvkbd
2 Comments | 6,569 views

I’ve been trying uzbl for the last few days and I am pretty much impressed on how useful such a small application can be in certain usage cases!

I installed it on my Debian testing using the following blog post: Installing uzbl on Debian Squeeze .
Be sure to make install else you’ll have no config and uzbl will be unusable!!!

The first place I used it was for the urlLauncher plugin of urxvt. On my .Xdefaults I have the following piece of code:
urxvt.perl-ext-common: default,matcher,-option-popup,-selection-popup,-realine
urxvt.matcher.button: 1
urxvt.urlLauncher: /usr/local/bin/urxvt-url.sh

and my /usr/local/bin/urxvt-url.sh contains:
#!/bin/sh
uzbl "$1"

Now every url on the console get’s highlighted and I can open it with uzbl. And that means opening really fast!

Example:
urxvt terminal (tabbed by fluxbox) with some urls highlighted by the perl matcher plugin of urxvt:

left clicking on one of the urls opens it with uzbl:

Apart from that, I’ve started using uzbl to open links on instant messengers, IRC clients and in every other place that people send me simple links to check out or I need a fast browser instance. Some people might say that it looks like links2 graphical mode, but it’s NOT like opening urls with “links -G” because uzbl is based on webkit and that means it can deal with javascript, java, flash, whatever…

I just love the way you can keybind all the actions you want on it…on the example config that comes with it, you quit the browser by typing ZZ…how great is that ? 😀

Some usage tips
1) Tabbed behavior (if you have fluxbox):
In ~/.config/uzbl/config add
bind t _ = spawn uzbl --uri %s
and in ~/.fluxbox/apps add the [group] tag before the [app] tag for uzbl like that:

[group]
 [app] (name=uzbl) (class=Uzbl)
  [Workspace]   {0} 
  [Head]    {0} 
  [Dimensions]  {800 1284}
  [Position]    (UPPERLEFT) {0 0}
  [Maximized]   {yes}
  [Jump]    {yes}
  [Close]   {yes}
[end]

Now the command t www.google.com inside uzbl, will open a new tabbed window of uzbl with www.google.com loaded in it.

2) Close uzbl window with ctrl+w
In ~/.config/uzbl/config add:

bind     ctrl+v ctrl+w    = exit

(press ctrl+v ctrl+w one after the other and you will get something like ^W in the file)

P.S. If you are a person that just came from the point and click windows world to the beautiful world of linux, or you are a person that loves bloated desktop managers like KDE/gnome/etc or bloated applications like firefox/iceweasel/konqueror don’t even think of installing it. You’ll never understand its value…
P.S.2. If Richard Stallman decided to browse the web and had an internet connection uzbl would probably be his browser of choice 😛

Filed by kargig at 17:15 under Linux
Tags: browser, debian, firefox, fluxbox, iceweasel, lightweight, Linux, terminal, urxvt, uzbl
7 Comments | 15,070 views

I’ve finally settled down to a solution that I am happy with. I used to have the following options inside my Xorg.conf:
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
Driver "synaptics"
[...snip...]
Option "TapButton1" "1"
Option "TapButton2" "3"
Option "TapButton3" "2"
Option "VertTwoFingerScroll" "1"
Option "HorizTwoFingerScroll" "1"
[...snip...]


This works like this:
i) a single tap is a left click
ii) a two-finger tap is a right click
iii) a three-finger tap is a middle click
and you could scroll horizontally and vertically using two fingers on the touchpad, like Mac OS X.
The problem with this setup is that I used to have a lot of accidental double tappings while scrolling with two fingers horizontally or vertically. This of course produced unwanted right clicks.

I wanted a solution that I could get right click in somehow like Mac OS X does it, using ctrl+tap/ctrl+click. I found a solution that emulated ctrl+click as a right click but then many applications started misbehaving. Firefox for example uses ctrl+click on Linux to open a link on a new tab, when I used ctrl+click as a right click, Firefox stopped opening the links. So I went to plan B.

CMD key(apple key)-click as a right click.

To achieve that:
a) install xvkbd.
Debian: apt-get install xvkbd
Gentoo: emerge xvkbd
b) install xbindkeys.
Debian: apt-get install xbindkeys
Gentoo: emerge xbindkeys
c) create the default .xbindkeysrc file: xbindkeys –defaults > ~/.xbindkeysrc
d) edit it and put the following inside: "xvkbd -text '\m3'"
mod4 + b:1 (mouse)
e) edit xorg.conf and set this: Option "TapButton2" "0"
This effectively disables double tapping as a right click.
f) restart X
g) open a terminal and start xbindkeys from it: $ xbindkeys -n -v
Now press CMD key and tap the touchpad or click the touchpad button. You should be greeted with a fresh right click!

If all went well put xbindkeys in your DE’s autostart.

The following works flawlessly on XFCE/LXDE. CMD-click or CMD-tap opens XFCE’s menu or LXDE’s desktop menu.

On fluxbox though there is still a problem. It’s very common for fluxbox key config to look something like the following:
OnDesktop Mouse1 :hideMenus
OnDesktop Mouse2 :workspaceMenu
OnDesktop Mouse3 :rootMenu
OnDesktop Mouse4 :nextWorkspace
OnDesktop Mouse5 :prevWorkspace


So to open the RootMenu, which is the basic menu with the applications shortcuts for fluxbox, one needs to actually right click on the Desktop. That worked with TabButton2=3 but it does not work right now. To get around that problem I binded the key left to (1/!) which is normally the (±/§) key on Macs to the Menu key using xmodmap.
$ cat .xmodmap
keycode 94 = Menu

I never used that key anyway…

I’ve now got my precious right click back without accidental miss-clicks. yihaa!

References: FreeBSD on an Apple MacBook

Filed by kargig at 22:29 under Gentoo,Linux
Tags: accidental, click, ctrl-click, ctrl+tap, debian, fluxbox, Gentoo, Linux, lxde, macbook, right-click, synaptic, toucpad, xfce
7 Comments | 34,260 views

I recently upgraded from a stable fluxbox release (1.0.0) to a development one (1.1.1), on gentoo x11-wm/fluxbox-1.1.1-r1, ~x86 branch . There have been some interesting changes. If you also upgrade you might find though that your “tabs” are not working.
Recent fluxbox versions (1.1.0+) have dumped the old “groups” file which used to contain applications that could be grouped in tabs. Now the grouped applications must be declared inside the “apps” file. The syntax is rather simple, if you want an application to have tab support just add a “[group]” line before it. For example if you had a groups file that combined urxvt, xterm and aterm tabs:
% cat ~/.fluxbox/groups
urxvt xterm aterm

The new proper syntax in apps file would be:
%cat ~/.fluxbox/apps
[group]
[app] (name=urxvt)
[app] (name=xterm)
[app] (name=aterm)
[end]

I wrote a perl script that can convert your old groups file to the new group format for apps file. fbox_groups_to_apps.pl

Bugs reports,fixes are more than welcome…

Filed by kargig at 21:07 under Gentoo,Linux
Tags: convert, fluxbox, Gentoo, perl, script, tabs
1 Comment | 7,623 views