X11 Cursor Themes

On Arch wiki is a really nice tutorial how to setup custom X11 cursor theme. The good thing is how solution is pretty desktop/wm neutral, so it works under EDE as charm.

I found Chameleon theme very nice; you also get three different sizes: large, medium and small. Neat!

Following above wiki tutorial, I would add how using "~/.icons/default/index.theme" is probably the best solution. You don't have to mess with "~/.Xdefaults", nor need to have permissions to play with "/usr/share/icons" folder.

After you populate "~/.icons/default/index.theme", X11 will instantly load selected cursor theme. The only thing I found are often crashes, originating from libXcursor library. This could be either from graphic driver (nVidia of course) or from older X-es I'm currently running (time to upgrade it).

Charting library

Sometimes you need to draw charts on more pragmatically way than is usually done. Unfortuately, most of the things out there pretty sucks or are in the good way to do so.

For some time I used PyChart, but due it's complexity and really odd api, I dumped it and get back to OpenOffice. Yes, I went back to stone age, from nice comfort of favorite editor to clicking on eat-all-available-memory OpenOffice.

From time to time, I stumble upon some library, but nothing I would be satisfied with. Until I found guile-charting.

Honestly, Guile is not my favorite package and I install it mostly to play with differences on Scheme implementations, but from no on, guile-charting will be probably the main reason why I will keep Guile package installed.

Here is the sample code (also on pastebin):

(use-modules (charting))

(make-bar-chart "Monthly status for Foo project"
'(("January"
   (232 "Download")
   (20 "Upload"))
 ("February"
   (80 "Download")
   (320 "Upload"))
 ("March"
   (130 "Download")
   (150 "Upload"))
 )

 #:write-to-png "usage.png"
 #:chart-height 200
)

and will produce this:


You will also need guile-cairo for guile-charting.

Communicating with desktop #2

I imported ede-scriptbus on the repo (it is in branches), adding few new stuff: setting XSETTINGS values and explicit XSETTINGS serialization, which was done implicitly when evoke quits. For example, to change current background color of EDE apps, this will be used:

./ede-scriptbus
> (set-xsettings "Fltk/Background" '(R G B A))

where, as you guessed correctly, you are using separated color components. The good thing about (set-xsettings) is how it will figure out parameter type and send correct message to evoke.

Due the nature of XSETTINGS protocol, changes will be instantly applied.

Too bad Gtk+ (as it implements XSETTINGS) does not implement some keys for changing foreground and background colors, so we could apply color changes on Gtk+ apps too.