xara: Debian package manager

Most Ubuntu users prefer Software Center or synaptic for package management. Those who love the command-line definitely use apt all the time. In this article we will explore another package manager available in the default repos – xara. xara is written in GTK+ and has powerful capabilities.

Hacking noice: fast cmdline file browser

noice is a minimal file browser for those who don’t like to type cd ... to reach a file, then open it; or one who doesn’t like to open a file browser and keep clicking to find and open a file. noice reduces the effort to pressing the arrow keys. Originally noice is written as a utility having minimal interactions with X. For example, image files are opened with feh. Considering most people use X and love to use to GUI apps when it makes sense, I have forked a branch with some changes of my own.

Toggle touchpad on Ubuntu 16.04

Laptops with larger touchpad area pose a serious problem with typing. While we explored a way to reduce the effective touchpad area, sometimes turning off the touchpad is a better solution. The 14.04 way of setting synclient TouchpadOff to 0 or 1 doesn’t work on 16.04. So here’s a fresh technique with a little bit of scripting.

Lumina DE: a fresh desktop to try out

The 1.0 Beta release of the Lumina Desktop Environment made some news this week. While it is the flagship DE for PC-BSD, Lumina can be installed and used on many other distros as well. We’ll see how to install it on Ubuntu 15.10 (and link to the procedure for other distros) but a little about Lumina first.

Getting started with neovim

This article is meant to be a short quickstart guide on using neovim on Ubuntu. neovim has been around for a while and we wanted to explore it as a vim alternative. We are on Ubuntu and the plan is to transfer all vim dependencies to neovim.