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Using IceWM and a Raspberry Pi as my main PC, sharing my theme, config and some
tips and tricks.

  Published: 10-07-2021 | Author: Remy van Elst | [11]Text only version
  of this article

  [INS: :INS]

Table of Contents

    * [12]Resource Usage
    * [13]Configuration
         + [14]Window Snapping / Expose / Tiling
    * [15]Menu Maker
    * [16]Theme
    * [17]Tray
    * [18]Toolbar
    * [19]Cursor size
    * [20]Larger font size in QT applications
    * [21]Autostart applications
    __________________________________________________________________

  My IceWM Desktop

  KDE is my desktop environment of choice. KDE5 is rock-solid,
  configurable in any way possible and works great. It treats you like a
  responsible adult instead of a child like GNOME does these days, and
  after XFCE switched to GTK3, the RAM usage is on-par, more often than
  not a bare KDE install (Debian or Arch) uses around 300MB ram. This is
  with Baloo (search indexer) and Akonadi (PIM database backend)
  disabled. Great default behaviour, low resource usage and enourmous
  configurability, so why is this post then titled 'IceWM'? At home I'm
  using a small ARM device (Raspberry Pi 4 with an SSD) as my main
  computer, and there resources are limited. KDE runs fine, but you
  notice that it is a bit slower than on my work computer. IceWM on the
  other hand, uses less than 30 MB of RAM and even less CPU. The program
  that gives you a desktop background, icewmbg, uses double the RAM of
  IceWM itself! IceWM, next to Awesome, is one of my favorite window
  managers, very configurable and provides all I need. This PC doesn't
  have multiple screens, which would be a bit more of a hassle than with
  KDE. After switching, the machine feels a lot faster. It's the small
  details in which I notice it, like text input, a few seconds of lag
  here and there. This post shows my IceWM config including some options
  explained, my IceWM theme and a few tips and tricks to configure the
  rest of the desktop.

  [22]Consider sponsoring me on Github. It means the world to me if you
  show your appreciation and you'll help pay the server costs.
  [23]You can also sponsor me by getting a Digital Ocean VPS. With this
  referral link you'll get $100 credit for 60 days.

  If you're wondering why I use a Raspberry Pi, it has to do with my
  commute and the weight of my backpack. For the past few years I'd only
  have work computers at home, sometimes workstations and sometimes
  laptops (heavy due to the specs). Nothing that actually was mine. We
  are going back to the office instead of full remote work, what drew me
  over the line was the weight of my current work laptop. When cycling to
  work its really noticeable if you have 3 kilograms less weight in your
  bag. Without laptop and power brick, I'm only carrying lunch, a tire
  repair kit and my wallet. Why not leave the laptop at work? Well, it's
  uncertain if the next day I'll be at work due to covid. Maybe a
  coworker has to quarantine and so do we or maybe the rules change.
  Also, just tinkering and playing around with the Pi 4, is fun.

Resource Usage

  As for RAM usage goes, here's what ps_mem.py tells me on this machine:
Private  +   Shared  =  RAM used       Program

352.0 KiB + 500.0 KiB = 852.0 KiB       icewm-session
384.0 KiB + 546.0 KiB = 930.0 KiB       xscreensaver
 3.3 MiB +   6.4 MiB =   9.7 MiB       xdm (2)
 8.2 MiB +  10.5 MiB =  18.7 MiB       NetworkManager
11.2 MiB +  16.6 MiB =  27.8 MiB       icewm
15.9 MiB +  42.1 MiB =  58.0 MiB       klipper
28.5 MiB +  33.1 MiB =  61.6 MiB       firewalld
25.8 MiB +  46.1 MiB =  71.9 MiB       nm-applet
20.7 MiB +  52.7 MiB =  73.3 MiB       konsole
34.8 MiB +  69.3 MiB = 104.0 MiB       dolphin
58.3 MiB +  60.3 MiB = 118.7 MiB       icewmbg
68.9 MiB + 150.3 MiB = 219.3 MiB       sublime_text
57.1 MiB + 186.8 MiB = 243.9 MiB       Xorg
300.9 MiB + 330.4 MiB = 631.3 MiB       thunderbird
341.6 MiB + 558.7 MiB = 900.3 MiB       firefox (3)

  I've stripped out some less useful parts, but this is normal usage for
  this machine. A bit of browsing, a bit of writing and some email. C++
  development (in CLion) is quite doable, although I prefer plain old vim
  on this machine due to CLion being quite laggy. CMake, make or gcc all
  run fine, al be it a bit slower initially. ccache helps a lot for
  further compilation. But for most of that kind of programming work I
  can use my work computer.

  This machine had KDE5 running first, fully configured and themes. Most
  of those settings came over to IceWM, like the larger cursor in QT
  applications. I'm unsure how a newly setup IceWM would handle those
  changes. Send me an email if you know. But keep that in mind when you
  try the below things and they don't work, it might be because KDE
  already did it for me.

  This Raspberry Pi is in a [24]special case for cooling and the SSD. It
  was [25]Jeff Geerling's review of the case that made me buy it. Great
  choice, nice case. Read his review to find out more.

  One thing to takeaway from this article is that IceWM feels fast and
  snappy. KDE feels the same on my work computer, which has an i9 and
  128GB of RAM, but this is a Raspberry Pi 4, a small 1.5GHz ARM board,
  on which KDE still is fast, runs fine, but has a noticeable lag. The Pi
  now runs Arch Linux Arm, but first ran default Raspbian. For the
  speed-feeling, that made no difference in KDE.

  Using noscript to disable javascript in Firefox has also helped
  tremendously. I can still turn it on when I want to, but it saves so
  much Web Content processes eating up resources.

Configuration

  Before you start doing any of this, make sure you have the
  configuration files in your home folder:
mkdir ~/.icewm/
cp -R /usr/share/icewm/* ~/.icewm/

  I've changed little to the provided default configuration. I don't use
  workspaces, so they are gone from the taskbar as is the mail icon. The
  fontsize is increased a bit and MenuMouseTracking is on (otherwise I'd
  have to click each startmenu item instead of hovering over it). The
  grep command strips out everything starting with a # (comment) and any
  empty lines, showing just the changes I made:
$ grep -E -v -e "^#" -e "^$" .icewm/preferences

MenuMouseTracking=1

SmartPlacement=1
SnapMove=1

TaskBarShowMailboxStatus=0
TaskBarShowWindowListMenu=0
TaskBarShowWorkspaces=0

ActiveButtonFontNameXft="sans-serif:size=14:bold"
ActiveTaskBarFontNameXft="sans-serif:size=14:bold"
ActiveWorkspaceFontNameXft="sans-serif:size=14"
ApmFontNameXft="monospace:size=14"
ClockFontNameXft="monospace:size=14"
TitleFontNameXft="sans-serif:size=14"
ToolButtonFontNameXft="sans-serif:size=14"
ToolTipFontNameXft="sans-serif:size=14"

DesktopBackgroundImage="~/wallpaper.jpeg"
DesktopBackgroundScaled=1

KeySysAddressBar="Alt+Space"

KeySysCollapseTaskBar=""
KeyWinMenu=""

NetworkStatusDevice="[eth]*"

  The empty KeySysCollapseTaskBar and KeyWinMenu are to unset those
  keyboard shortcuts. I'm used to ALT+SPACE for krunner (to execute a
  command), a simpler version is built into IceWM. I've configured that
  to ALT+SPACE (which was KeyWinMenu first, that's why that is unset). It
  turns the taskbar into a textbox to enter a command in. Below are two
  screenshots, one of the taskbar and one of the KeyWinMenu feature:

  taskbar

  krunner

  Not as configurable as krunner or dmenu, but it's built in.

  KeySysCollapseTaskBar collides with my preferred Clipboard manager
  shortcut (CTRL+ALT+H), which is why it's unset.

  The desktop background option should be clear enough. SnapMove and
  SmartPlacement let's windows snap to one another when moving or opening
  a new one.

Window Snapping / Expose / Tiling

  I like the Window Snapping feature of KDE (and Windows), so I've
  configured the following shortcuts in my .icewm/keys file:
key "Alt+Left" icesh -f left top sizeto 50% 100%
key "Alt+Right" icesh -f right top sizeto 50% 100%

  This allows me to press Alt plus an arrow key to get a window resized
  exactly to half the screen, either left or right.

  If it doesn't work, make sure the window is not maximized (press
  ALT+F10).

  My tiling window manager of choice is Awesome, but to my surprise IceWM
  has two built-in keyboard shortcuts to tile windows:
#  Tiles all windows from top to bottom maximized horizontally.
# KeySysTileHorizontal="Alt+Shift+F3"

#  Tiles all windows from left to right maximized vertically.
# KeySysTileVertical="Alt+Shift+F2"

  You learn a lot when you read through the config files.

Menu Maker

  The default menu doesn't list any useful applications, but mmaker,
  otherwise known as Menu Maker comes to the rescue. This is the command
  I use to update the menu.
mmaker -f --no-legacy --no-debian icewm -t Konsole

  It does not include the Debian style menu neither are console
  applications (like alsamixer) included. I like Konsole as my default
  terminal, otherwise it would be xterm.

Theme

  The picture below shows the theme I use. It's the [26]SilverXP theme
  but with the larger cursors from the [27]K-ath-Leen theme. Nothing
  fancy, copied SilverXP to a new folder, copied the cursors into there
  and set that as my theme:
cp -r .icewm/themes/SilverXP .icewm/themes/RemyXP
cp -r .icewm/themes/K-ath-Leen/cursors .icewm/themes/RemyXP/

  theme

  There are no icons on the desktop. That is not a feature I use, I
  either use ALT+SPACE (krunner, dmenu, whatever) or toolbar icons.

Tray

  The right side of the toolbar houses the tray with a few (built in to
  IceWM) monitoring graphs, icons and a clock. Nothing fancy, but just
  what I like.

  tray

  By default there is a mail envelope icon, which I disabled.

Toolbar

  Next to the start button I have a few buttons to launch applications:

  toolbar

  This is configured in the .icewm/toolbar file. The icon part is found
  in the /usr/share/icons folder structure, but without the extension.

  The format per line is:
    * prog (literal string prog)
    * Name of program
    * icon filename without extension. Set to a dash - if you want to
      show the Name.
    * binary to execute

  This is my list:
prog "Konsole" utilities-terminal konsole
prog "Dolphin" system-file-manager dolphin
prog "Sublime Text" kwrite subl
prog  "Mozilla Firefox"  firefox  /usr/bin/firefox
prog  "Mozilla Thunderbird"  thunderbird  /usr/bin/thunderbird

  The full path to the Dolphin icon is
  /usr/share/icons/breeze/apps/32/system-file-manager.svg.

Cursor size

  I like my user interface elements large. Not only font size, also the
  mouse cursor. I had that configured via the KDE system settings panel,
  here is the gsettings command to do it on the GTK side of things:
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-size 48

  On the KDE side of things, this command writes out a config file:
kwriteconfig5 --file ~/.config/kcminputrc --group Mouse --key cursorTheme breeze
_cursors

  In that file you can edit the cursor size:
[Mouse]
cursorSize=48
cursorTheme=breeze_cursors

  Logout and back in to make it active. On the [28]Arch Wiki the page on
  [29]Cursor Themes lists more ways of changing the cursor size.

Larger font size in QT applications

  I like to have a larger font size and when using KDE, that is an option
  in the settings menu. After I switched over to IceWM, all QT5
  applications reverted back to their smaller default fontsize. The GTK
  applications still have the larger fontsize. I found a fix on
  StackOverflow to increase the font size in all QT5 applications. Edit
  the following file:
vim /etc/profile.d/qt-fontsize.sh

  Place the below contents:
# For the graphical elements
export QT_SCALE_FACTOR=1.5

# To make the fonts readable
export QT_FONT_DPI=96

  You must logout and login to make this active.

  Here is a before and after screenshot to show the difference. On the
  left is the default, on the right it's using the above config.

  large font

Autostart applications

  You need to create a script to autostart applications on login, like
  the network manager applet or clipboard manager. First create the
  script and make it executable:
touch ~/.icewm/startup
chmod +x ~/.icewm/startup

  Edit it with your favorite editor. Below is the contents of mine. sleep
  1 is in there for tray applications because they are windowed
  otherwise, that looks weird.
#!/bin/sh

# allow notifications
/usr/lib/notification-daemon-1.0/notification-daemon &

# start network manager
sleep 1 && nm-applet &

# enable screensaver
xscreensaver -nosplash &

# clipboard manager
sleep 1 && /bin/parcellite &

#screenshots
sleep 1 && /bin/shutter &

  Tags: [30]arch , [31]blog , [32]debian , [33]desktop , [34]icewm ,
  [35]linux , [36]raspberry-pi , [37]windows

  ____________________

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References

  1. https://raymii.org/s/inc/opensearch.xml
  2. https://raymii.org/s/feed.xml
  3. https://raymii.org/s/blog/Using_IceWM_and_sharing_my_config_and_tips_tricks.html#main
  4. https://raymii.org/s/
  5. https://raymii.org/s/
  6. https://raymii.org/s/static/About.html
  7. https://raymii.org/s/tags/all.html
  8. https://raymii.org/s/software/Sparkling_Network.html
  9. https://raymii.org/s/feed.xml
 10. gopher://raymii.org/
 11. https://raymii.org/s/blog/Using_IceWM_and_sharing_my_config_and_tips_tricks.txt
 12. https://raymii.org/s/blog/Using_IceWM_and_sharing_my_config_and_tips_tricks.html#toc_0
 13. https://raymii.org/s/blog/Using_IceWM_and_sharing_my_config_and_tips_tricks.html#toc_1
 14. https://raymii.org/s/blog/Using_IceWM_and_sharing_my_config_and_tips_tricks.html#toc_2
 15. https://raymii.org/s/blog/Using_IceWM_and_sharing_my_config_and_tips_tricks.html#toc_3
 16. https://raymii.org/s/blog/Using_IceWM_and_sharing_my_config_and_tips_tricks.html#toc_4
 17. https://raymii.org/s/blog/Using_IceWM_and_sharing_my_config_and_tips_tricks.html#toc_5
 18. https://raymii.org/s/blog/Using_IceWM_and_sharing_my_config_and_tips_tricks.html#toc_6
 19. https://raymii.org/s/blog/Using_IceWM_and_sharing_my_config_and_tips_tricks.html#toc_7
 20. https://raymii.org/s/blog/Using_IceWM_and_sharing_my_config_and_tips_tricks.html#toc_8
 21. https://raymii.org/s/blog/Using_IceWM_and_sharing_my_config_and_tips_tricks.html#toc_9
 22. https://github.com/sponsors/RaymiiOrg/
 23. https://www.digitalocean.com/?refcode=7435ae6b8212
 24. https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2021/argon-one-m2-raspberry-pi-ssd-case-review
 25. https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2021/argon-one-m2-raspberry-pi-ssd-case-review
 26. https://github.com/bbidulock/icewm-extra-themes/tree/master/data/SilverXP
 27. https://github.com/bbidulock/icewm-extra-themes/tree/master/data/K-ath-Leen
 28. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Cursor_themes
 29. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Cursor_themes
 30. https://raymii.org/s/tags/arch.html
 31. https://raymii.org/s/tags/blog.html
 32. https://raymii.org/s/tags/debian.html
 33. https://raymii.org/s/tags/desktop.html
 34. https://raymii.org/s/tags/icewm.html
 35. https://raymii.org/s/tags/linux.html
 36. https://raymii.org/s/tags/raspberry-pi.html
 37. https://raymii.org/s/tags/windows.html
 38. https://raymii.org/s/
 39. https://raymii.org/s/static/About.html
 40. https://raymii.org/s/tags/all.html
 41. https://raymii.org/s/software/Sparkling_Network.html
 42. https://raymii.org/s/software/ingsoc.html

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