Tag Archives: XFCE

Discover mpd

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I’m probably obsessed with this music player called mpd, but what the heck. I’ve good reason to be, especially since I listen to music for the greater part of the day. Having a good music player is like having a good chair to sit on. Sure, no one thinks it’s that big a deal, but paying atten­tion to posture helps your health in the long run.

To clarify, I’m not obsessed with mpd per se, just the concept of a modular­ized client-server archi­tec­ture for playing music. mpd is the server, gmpc is the client that I’ve chosen to use, along with a couple of other compo­nents such as scmpc to scrobble my tracks and music­tracker to update my Pidgin status. I also found an XFCE applet that can control mpd. As an added bonus, it turns out that I can adjust the master volume by scrolling my mouse-wheel over the applet, something I’ve wanted for a long time. Sweet.

Mutt [Insert Dog Joke Here]

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After I switched from KDE to XFCE as my desktop environ­ment, I had to abandon KMail as my email client (since I would rather not run KDE-based appli­ca­tions in a non-KDE environ­ment). The replace­ment I settled on was mutt, something I had already tried and liked a lot.

So what’s the big deal about console appli­ca­tions, you ask? I don’t know, but they’re just much nicer than GUI clients. It must be genetic or something.

So here’s how I’ve set up mutt:

  • I can read my Gmail messages (actually, Google Mail for my domain).
  • I can send email using Postfix, which routes messages through Gmail’s server
  • The recipient’s address is automat­i­cally added to my address­book when I send email
  • I can look up or autocom­plete addresses while composing email
  • Messages are signed using GnuPG before they are actually sent

I don’t like to manually check my email. Instead, I’ve set up a mail-notification applet (a ‘biff’) to check my email every couple of minutes and play a sound when there are new messages. Reading, deleting and composing mail are all just a few keystrokes away. Addition­ally, there is no need to open any heavy appli­ca­tion — the terminal window pops up within seconds.

XFCE Desktop

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To cut a long story short, I’ve switched from KDE to XFCE, which is univer­sally acknowl­edged as a ‘light­weight’ and easily customiz­able desktop environ­ment. When I earlier switched to KDE 4.1, there were several bugs that were a constant source of irrita­tion. Add to that the fact that appli­ca­tions like Amarok (which were the reason why I loved KDE) did not have the same level of features as their 3.5 version avatars, and I realized there was nothing that I really needed from KDE 4.1 anymore. I could have switched back to 3.5 of course, but I gener­ally don’t like to rollback to an earlier version after having tasted the newer one. That’s how I ended up with XFCE.

XFCE has a nice clean look, and it is much faster too. Person­ally, I would happily sacri­fice desktop effects for perfor­mace, so this switch worked out pretty well for me. Of course, there was ‘The Terminal UTF-8 Problem’ which I will describe in detail in another post.…