 It's probably a fact that I customize my desktop too often. I've talked about this before that I kind of have an addiction to rising and I know that there are a ton of people out there that just hate the word rising, but it's kind of the one that the community has adopted. So when I say rising, I mean, customizing my desktop, choosing a color scheme, choosing a wallpaper, choosing a GTK theme, those kind of things. And we're just going to use the term rising, even though I know some people hate it. I know that I do this too often. I've even talked about it in terms of it being a waste of time and all this stuff. So the problem is, or not the problem, I guess, is that I don't care. Like I don't care that I do this too often. I have fun doing it, so there's no sense in me stopping doing it. So if you're kind of like me and you enjoy racing your desktop, what I thought I'd do today is go through five things that you absolutely must get right to have the perfect rice. So let's go ahead and jump in. The first thing on the list that you absolutely have to get right is the wallpaper. If you fail to do a good wallpaper, the rest of your rice is going to suffer. It's kind of like walking out of the house with a pair of pants and a shirt that just don't match. You know, they just don't go together. If your wallpaper and the rest of your rice don't go together, the whole thing looks weird and it just won't sit well for you or anybody who sees your rice. So the very first thing you should almost always do, unless you're taking a rice from someone else, is find the wallpaper that you want to use for the rest of your rice. And this is going to help you through the rest of the customizing process. Because what you can do if you don't have a color scheme in mind, you can take the colors from that wallpaper and then use them as your color scheme throughout the rest of the system. So for example, this is my current rice right now. And if we open up a terminal and stuff like that, this is what my rice looks like. And this is actually a rice that I came up with on my own. It's not based on anything else. So if we just fit them into something else, you can see even the Vim theme is kind of going with this red and black scheme. And all goes with this wallpaper. Now, the one thing I haven't quite got right is the color matching of the reds. They're kind of off. Wallpaper is more of a pinkish red. And the red that I'm using here is more of a dark red. I'm still working on it. I'm tweaking it. But the point is, is that you want to make sure as you go along the customizing process is that you've gone. You've kept in mind the color scheme of the wallpaper that you've chosen. This is most important when you're doing your own color scheme. If you're using someone else's or you're using one of built pre-built color themes like Nord or Dracula or whatever, it doesn't matter as much because you're probably going to find a wallpaper that fits that color scheme instead of the other way around. So that's number one on the list. The next thing on the list is borders. Now, when I talk about borders, actually, I will just go ahead and show you. This is again, when I talk about borders, I'm talking about something like this. So you can see around this terminal, I have a red border. So one of the things that is important, if you're going to use borders, is making sure that the colors of those borders match everything else. And you also want to make sure that you can live with the thickness of those borders. Now, I like a very thick border around my windows when I'm in floating mode or when I have gaps. So if I just open up another terminal and you just see when I'm have one screen open or one application open, there's no border at all. But if I open up another terminal, then I have borders with this particular setup. I like it simply because it allows me to have borders sometimes and not have borders at other times. It's not for everybody. Some people don't like borders at all. Some people have thicker borders than I do. Some people go through and have just really, really thin borders. It's a choice. But the point is, is that when you go through and do your racing, you want to make sure that you can live with the border choices that you've made. And I find myself that the borders are one of the things that I tweak the most often when I'm first doing a race, because I always want to make sure I get that ratio right. Because if you have two really too thick of borders, they get in the way. If they're too small for me, I can't really see them. And then it makes no sense to have borders at all. So it's kind of a balancing act. It's not as if it's important, but none of this stuff is actually all that important. It's all about cosmetics. So the next one on the list is gaps. So while we're here, you can see that I have gaps enabled. Now, gaps are not for everyone. So we've talked about this before on the channel. Gaps are something that are very kind of polarizing because a lot of people, they can't stand the fact that I'm wasting screen real estate with gaps because they really provide no purpose whatsoever. Like none whatsoever. There are no reasons that would actually make a gap useful, at least that I can think of. They even call them vanity gaps, but I like them and I like them to be around. But the thing is, is that I've moved. I used to have gaps all the time, even if there were only one client on the screen. But now that I've moved to this, I like it when the gaps aren't there, when I have one client on the screen, but are there when I have multiple clients. And that's just a personal preference. The reason why gaps are important is because it's one of the things that is going to play a really big role in how your rice looks. The difference between a rice with gaps and a rice without gaps is very large because a lot of the times if you have no gaps, you'll probably never going to see your wallpaper at all. You could probably just go ahead and choose a blank screen for your wallpaper and you'd be perfectly fine because you probably never going to see it. But going back to that first point, your wallpaper is important. And if you spent a lot of time on your wallpaper, gaps allow you to see it every once in a while, even if you just see a little bit. The same thing with transparency. Transparency is not really on the list because it's really not for everybody. But if you are interested in kind of having a peek of your wallpaper, transparency and gaps are great tools. The next one is very nerdy and it's one that I don't get right a lot, but I try. So the next one is padding. Now, you're probably wondering, what the hell is padding? If you've never done any development on websites, you probably never even heard of the word padding, at least in this context. Padding is basically the space between one object and another. So, for example, in these terminals here, you can see that there's a space between all the stuff that's in the terminal and the edge of the terminal. That's padding. Now, one area where I don't do a very good job of padding is in the bar. Really, my bar needs a little bit more padding on the outside in order to be good. But I haven't actually gone through and done that. It's not something that I pay much attention to. But I should if I was having really good racing etiquette, I guess, I don't know. It's not really the right term, but you get the idea. The reason why padding is important is simply because it adds detail to your race. It allows you to go through and kind of make your race neater, if that makes sense. So let's just go ahead and get into my Lackardy config. So if I go into my repo here and go into a Lackardy and vim into my Lackardy config here and remove all of the padding, we're just going to change these two numbers to zero. And now if you take a look at these terminals over here, the padding is gone and that looks kind of like garbage. It really does. Like everything is right up against the edge and it just doesn't look all that great. Now, I've found that about 15 pixels of padding in your terminal is perfect. It may be a little bit too much for you. It depends on how big your monitor is. Like if you're on a small laptop, you're going to want a little bit less padding than if you're you have a gigantic monitor like I do or gigantic ish, I should say. So how you go about doing this whole padding and this kind of goes for gaps as well. It's going to depend a lot on how much real estate you have on your screen. Frankly, for padding, you need some, whether no matter how big your screen is. So whether you're just doing five pixels or 10 pixels for me, 15 has worked really well. But I could see for some people who have smaller screens, maybe you want to go with five. The point is, is that padding makes your terminal look better. So I'm going to go ahead and undo those things so you can kind of see the difference again. And you can now see that the space between has come back and it's so much better. So that is padding. I highly recommend that you play around with padding in your terminal and getting that right. You also want to do the same thing on the bar, like up here along the side, you want a little bit of extra padding. It would make it look better if I did. And obviously I have some serious padding issues going on up here in the bar, which actually leads into the next thing. So the last thing you want to spend some time doing is working on your bar. Honestly, if you use a bar, and most people probably do, it's probably going to be the one area that gains most of your attention, simply because it's the place where you can do most of your customizing. I've done a lot of these time lapse, racing videos, and I've been getting some comments like, isn't this more about Polybar than it is about i3, BSPWM, whatever? And the answer to that is kind of yes, because when you're customizing your window manager, there's not a ton actually that you're going to do. You're going to choose the wallpaper. You're going to choose the border size, the gap size, and the border color. Those four things, usually that's about it when it comes to what you're going to customize that are actually part of your window manager. Everything else is the bar. Now, in this case, we're in DWM, so DWM has its own bar, and that's what I customize. If you're in BSPWM or i3 or Xmonet or something, you may be using some other bar, whether it's Polybar or Xmonet or Tint2. You have options. But no matter what bar you're using, it's probably going to be the thing that you spend the most time on because you're going to be going through and adding widgets or modules. You're going to go through and customize those to have their own scripts and whatnot. You're going to be doing colors, padding, refresh rate, click events, all this stuff, right? And that is the bar. It's probably, as I say, the most important thing you can do when you're going to be racing your window manager or whatever is mess around with the bar outside of the wallpaper. Wallpaper is the most important. The bar has to be the second most important because those are the two things that are going to play the absolute biggest role in how your rights looks. So make sure when you're doing your racing that you have a good plan for your bar. Remember to focus your color scheme to match your wallpaper and then bring that color scheme forth into the bar in some way. So that is the most pointless video you've ever watched on YouTube. I'm sure that's true. But for those of us who are into racing, getting it right is part of the fun, right? If you are into this kind of thing, dealing with these minute details of how much padding is in your terminal and how much padding is in your bar, what widgets are in your, or modules are in your bar, do the workspace all show up or are you just going to show the ones that are active, the background colors, the wallpapers, the borders, the gaps, all this stuff plays a role in how entertaining this actually is. Now, obviously it's not for everyone. A lot of people don't like the tedium of going through and changing their color scheme once a week. It's just not for them. They find a look that they like, they stick with it forever and ever. Or there are those people out there who use a boom too and happen to really like that color of aborigine and they stick around with that wallpaper forever and ever and that's the color scheme and they like Yaru and it's fine and that's just what they do. I personally don't understand these people but to each their own, if that's the way you want to use your computer, that's the great thing about Linux, just do whatever the hell you want. I happen to like customizing my stuff and I like helping other people customize their stuff. So if you have tips for getting the best rice ever, leave those comments in the comment section below. I'd really like to hear from you. Make sure you like and subscribe. I really do appreciate everybody who has done that. You can follow me on Twitter at Linuxcast. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Linuxcast before I go. I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons. 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