Anatomy of the rice: Void + xmonad + gruvbox

Every screenshot thread eventually asks for the parts list, so here it is. The theme of the build: one palette, everywhere. If a pixel is on my screen, it’s one of the sixteen colors in my kitty.conf.

Base

• Void Linux — runit instead of systemd, xbps is fast, and the base install is genuinely minimal. My kind of distro: it does nothing until asked.
• xmonad — a window manager in ~30 lines of my own Haskell config, which is exactly as much window manager as I need.
• kitty with Inconsolata, 6px padding so text doesn’t kiss the borders.

The config that matters

Most of my xmonad.hs is stock. The part that isn’t:

myLayout = smartBorders $ spacingRaw True
    (Border 8 8 8 8) True (Border 8 8 8 8) True
    $ Tall 1 (3/100) (1/2) ||| Full

main = xmonad $ def
    { terminal    = "kitty"
    , modMask     = mod4Mask
    , borderWidth = 2
    , normalBorderColor  = "#3a3a3a"
    , focusedBorderColor = "#ffaf00"
    }

Yellow focused border, gray unfocused. Two layouts. That’s the whole ideology: the window manager should be a solved problem you stop thinking about.

Consistency is the aesthetic

The actual trick to a rice that photographs well isn’t any single component — it’s that kitty, polybar, dunst, rofi, and the GTK theme all read from the same sixteen hex values. When a notification pops over a terminal over the wallpaper, nothing clashes, because nothing can clash.

Rice tip: pick the palette first, then make every tool conform to it. Never theme a tool in isolation.

This site runs on the same rule. The CSS palette is literally copied out of kitty.conf — the browser is just another window on the desktop.