how to rice

This is guide on how to rice your wm/de in linux.

Step 1 - choose a WM/DE

• WM - stand for window manger. It controls the placement of windows. It may be a floating wm like openbox or a tiling wm like i3 or a dynamic tiling wm like bspwm.

Read more about number of available wm in the arch wiki. WM are more customizable than DE, and they usually have a easily modifiable configuration file instead of some GUI configuration manager.

• DE - stands for desktop environment.

A desktop environment bundles together a variety of components to provide common graphical user interface elements such as icons, toolbars, wallpapers, and desktop widgets. Additionally, most desktop environments include a set of integrated applications and utilities. Most importantly, desktop environments provide their own window manager, which can however usually be replaced with another compatible one. –Arch wiki

Some major DE are:

• Gnome
• KDE
• XFCE

Step 2 - choose a color-scheme

This is most important step, you have to choose one color scheme which will define how your rice will look.

Some popular color scheme are:

• Nord - dimmed colors - is easy on eyes - bluish
• Dracula - bright colors - bluish
• Gruvbox - brown

Step 3 - find a GTK theme, a theme for QT applications and some nice icon pack

For your rice to be consistent you have to find matching GTK and QT theme.

Arch wiki link on how to make GTK and QT app look uniform

If you are unable to find a matching GTK them for the color scheme you can:

• make you own GTK using phocus
• use a GUI oomox to create one

For QT apps on WM you can use qt5ct this will be availiable in your pacakage manager. If you are unable to found a matching qt theme, then you can:

• load a custom colors in qt5ct, (in Appearance tab in Palette group, a radio button Custom), these are stored in ~/.config/qt5ct/colors
• install kvantum-manager and then select it as Style: in qt5ct, and then you can use kvantum themes too, select them using kvantum-manager

Step 4 - fix color scheme of the wm or de, rice login-manager and choose a nice wallpaper

Now you need to fix the color of components of the wm or de, like title-bar, window-borders, windows-gaps, bar/panel, dock, lock screen, application launcher, terminal, widgets.

Now rice your login-manager/display-manager.

Now configure the compositor you are using.

Looking for alternatives tools or components check this awesome-ricing

Step 5 - set keybindings and mouse-bindings

Set the keybindings as you like them, this is most important for tiling window managers.

Step 6 - set startup programs, make scripts, rice boot screen, boot animation

Add some dmenu/rofi scripts, so you can be more productive. e.g. add a script to open the configuration of tools you use in you favorite editor, this will save you lot of time.

Step 7 - theme every application you use

Not you have to find a nice matching theme for your applications too. Here is list of some applications you may have to rice:

• text editor
• browser, rice the home-page
• video player
• music player
• discord client -if you use discord
• telegram-desktop - if you use telegram
• you should also add some stylesheets to websites you use frequently, use this open-source extension stylus

Step 8 - Create a backup of your configurations

You can use github, gitlab, host your own git server, or use some cloud storage for this.

✨ Keep Ricing