Fast follower post – making OpenBSD UI a bit “prettier” (as I see it)

In my last blog post, I shared how I set up my OpenBSD laptop from the bare metal. In retrospect, there are a handful of UI tweaks that I also perform to make my UI and workflow more consistent between my OpenBSD machines and my Linux (Ubuntu) machine. I know that the purists out there are crying “boo hiss” but then they probably were crying that when I talked about using Gnome instead of cwm and xenodm for my window manager <grin>. Here are some things that I like to do.

First things first, I had forgotten that I prefer to use the “regular” (not dark, not light) version of the Yaru-remix theme from https://gnome-look.org because it keeps the menu bar and window titlebars dark while still leaving things like Evolution’s list of folders, preview pane and list of messages pane with a light background. Again, more like what I see on Ubuntu in my Linux machines.

For my terminal prompt, I had forgotten at the time I did the nuke and re-pave that I had moved away from the old “green screen” look (green on a black background) and went with white on a black background to get the base look set up. I then use the ability to inject color into the PS1 prompt so that the machine name shows up in green and the current working directory shows up in blue with a white dollar-sign prompt by making this change in my ~/.profile file:

export PS1=”\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\]$ “

Next, I need to install the colorls package using “pkg_add” and enable a .kshrc file by adding this line to my ~/.profile file:

export ENV=$HOME/.kshrc

In the ~/.kshrc file itself, I add an alias to make a regular issuance of “ls” actually fire the colorls command:

alias ls=”colorls -G”

and just for giggles, I use “pkg_add” to import the vim (non-x11) package and make my old timey SunOS4 muscle memory not betray me when I’m trying to edit a file and mistype “vim” as just straight-up “vi”:

alias vi=”vim”

I also add this line to my /etc/rc.conf.local file (I haven’t figured out the magic syntax for rcctl to do this with no flags):

ntpd_flags=””

and then start the NTP daemon:

# rcctl start ntpd

Since I maintain several ports on OpenBSD (yeah, I know, I need to update some of them – I’m working on it! <grin>), I like to set up anonymous CVS access to the ports tree by adding this to my .profile:

export CVSROOT=anoncvs@anoncvs1.ca.openbsd.org:/cvs

and then do an initial checkout of that and the rest of the OpenBSD source code for good measure by running:

# cd /usr
# cvs -qd anoncvs@anoncvs1.ca.openbsd.org:/cvs checkout -rOPENBSD_6_7 -P src ports xenocara

I also make Firefox my default web browser and follow the recommendations at https://privacytools.io to ensure that I have it configured to maximum privacy mode.

One thing I’ve noticed is that it takes Gnome Evolution 3-4 launches to correctly pick up folder names in my EWS and IMAP mail services. I’m not sure why that is (it seems like some sort of network timeout more than anything else) but it’s just a minor annoyance. Keep re-launching it after it settles down and eventually it will get it right.

The other Evolution annoyance is that it doesn’t correctly identify the SPAM, TRASH and INBOX folders so some of the nice shortcuts you get from the context menu to expunge things (for example) and some of the nice automatic sorting of “Inbox” to the top of the folders list doesn’t happen with EWS accounts. Again, annoying, but it doesn’t limit the basic functionality of the email client.

Since it takes several hours (days?) to sync all of my NextCloud documents and email archive data, I generally try to switch off suspend when plugged in until everything is synced the first time. After that, I go back to a suspend after an hour of inactivity mode for my normal use. While you are in the settings app changing that, it’s a good time to turn off the notifications on both the main screen as well as the lock screen if you find them as annoying as I do.

In conclusion, these little tweaks and configuration allow me to have a pretty consistent workflow across all of my laptops/workstations so that I can continue the programming of my spinal cord that has been ongoing since the 80’s when it comes to working on *nix systems. I hope you found this to be a useful read.