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Comment by nextos | Hacker News Reader

Nice site. He hasn't covered yet some well known ones, or at least I cannot find them using the search field in his site:

* http://xmonad.org/

* http://tools.suckless.org/slock/

* http://software.schmorp.de/pkg/rxvt-unicode.html

* http://www.roaringpenguin.com/products/remind

* http://notmuchmail.org/

* http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/

* http://isync.sourceforge.net/mbsync.html

* https://github.com/Tox/toxic

* http://mcabber.com/

* https://01.org/connman

* https://01.org/powertop

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> Nice site.

Thank you!

> He hasn't covered yet some well known ones, or at least I cannot find them using the search field in his site

I've posted about all the software you mention bar toxic but, as you discovered, Tumblr's built-in search doesn't work terribly well. I'll add a Duck Duck Go search box this afternoon. (It's been on my todo list for, er, just over two years now...)

You can go simpler than slock: vlock -sna will switch to a locked console tty and prevent you from switching out until you've unlocked it. This avoids all of the problems with X-based lockers, some hinted at on https://github.com/google/xsecurelock#security-design

(Note: don't sudo vlock -sna if you haven't set a root password, add yourself to the vlock group instead.)

Very cool tip. This is one of the most useful Linux power user tips I got in a while. Thanks!

Now to script it as I spent most of my time in a X term emulator with a tmux session. Can someone effectively script X -> tty console then vlock?

You don't need to switch to a tty console yourself, you can run vlock -n while in X and it'll switch for you.

You sir are going to cause some late night geekage. Damn you!

UPDATE: So am I missing something, because I get more or less the man page below:

http://linux.die.net/man/1/vlock

And I see no -n argument. Are you using Linux or some other Unix? What version do you use?

(Sorry, I really need to sleep early, but you have to keep telling me how to improve my laptop!)

That looks like a man page from an old version. I've seen vlock -n on Ubuntu 14.04 and a two-year-old Gentoo.

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/man1/vlock.1.html

Turns out, quite annoyingly, the package on Arch providing vlock, and an older version at that, is kbd, from the Keyboard Project (http://www.kbd-project.org/).

FYI to everyone on Arch, for a current version that makes this work, you need the AUR package vlock-original, and then invoke that as the executable name in the terminal. I already replace xscreensaver and got rid of it. Thanks for the tip!

There's physlock[0] as well, as vlock (apparently) has some limitations according to physlock(1):

       physlock  is  an alternative to vlock, it is equivalent to `vlock -an'.
       It is written because vlock blocks some linux  kernel  mechanisms  like
       hibernate  and suspend and can therefore only be used with some limita‐
       tions.

I can't attest to this as I've only used vlock, so correct me if I'm wrong.

[0] http://github.com/muennich/physlock

Surely i3wm is a better choice than xmonad if you're rating them by "one thing well".

Surely you mean dwm.

I have tried many of them except dwm at this point. This is not because I dislike dwm (on the contrary, I love the idea and its "if you can't compile me you don't deserve me attitude), but i3wm and dwm are all derivitaves, of well, dwm user modifications that either stay dwm (with patchsets) or emerge into something different (uh, Mosca, i3wm, awesomewm for sure, and many others of the pure C variety; I am certain XMonad and others follow dwm aesthetics and philosophy in a very general sense because dwm went backwards by throwing out the kitchen sink and going for pure, raw simplicity). If you try any of the derivatives, you will notice they usually take one dwm patchset notion and focus on it, or try different window management logic (many of the new one try b-tree sorting and management of windows). But they all focus on doing one window management style or feature, and doing it well for those people (my favorite example: stumpwm/ratpoision were very much unique and popular, spawning many look-alikes by eschewing the mouse altogether).

I use i3wm and really liked StumpWM (will probably return to it soon), but to make this dichotomy is to oversimplify and not realize WM systems usually focus on one-feature for the tool and do it well. Not all WMs are alike and that is why, as a StumpWM fanboy, giving control to another one arbitrarily (I think it is the only WM that totes that as a feature btw), shoes a very unique that I vainly believe lines up with mine.

Just my 0.02.

For anybody who is trying out different window managers, I'd suggest giving herbstluftwm a shot.

http://herbstluftwm.org/

I have not had the time but heard good things about it.

Surely you mean AwesomeWM.

And I just want to say suckless tools are wonderful. I vascilate about studying C well enough to be dangerous, and I do see a very wonderful beauty in the aggressive Suckless C dogma. There is kid is so, to a novice, small and clean that I love their philosophy and orthodoxy.

Long live suckless! Does any use their st terminal emulator?

I use st exclusively. It's bound to my new terminal key mapping and I've never found a reason to use a different one. I tried urxvt and xterm but stuck with st.

I use st. My .xsession launches "st -e tmux" which lives on its own workspace (in XMonad).

Check their FAQ for getting the Delete key to work! http://git.suckless.org/st/tree/FAQ

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