During the last four episodes we've been creating a whole functional desktop customized for our personal use. Now let's add some final tweaks and tools in order to give our desktop a more polished look.
No matter what end task you give to a computer, you're always going to use a text editor somehow. In *nix systems there are a couple of niche text editors that are in everyone's lips, Emacs and Vim.
After fetching all the required info from the system now it's time to give some personality to the panel bar and some performance under the hood.
Knowing information about your system in real time is an expected thing in every computer. Now that we have a desktop we could be "piping" the information through the terminal emulator or we can use a bar to constantly display the wanted feedback from the computer.
In the previous episode we set up xorg and the bspwm window manager. All the interaction has been done from the tty until now but in order to communicate with the computer once we start our x-session, we need a terminal emulator program that gives us access to the shell.
Window managers allow you control where to place frames (or windows) and how they look in a graphical user interface. The two main classes of window managers are tiling window managers and floating window managers.
Desktop environments are just a pre-packed bunch of software from which you'll maybe need a ten percent. They are great for users that just want to strat using the OS, but if you want more control on what you install, what you use and how it behaves then it has to be done by hand.
After spending some time setting up several devices, discovering how to get hardware and software working in BSD based systems, here are some steps I came in after a clean installation.