KDE Plasma initial impressions

I’ve been wanting to give the KDE Plasma desktop a try for a while, so I’ve installed it on my old ThinkPad X220. Initial impressions, I like it, but coming from GNOME, the number of customisation options is somewhat mind-blowing.

KDE running on Debian Bookworm.
KDE Plasma 5.25.4 running on Debian Bookworm.

Firefox issues

I’m currently experiencing issues with Firefox where it becomes unresponsive to all input. I haven’t got time to debug it at the moment, so I’ve switched to Chrome. Not happy about it, but needs must.

Nextcloud Two-Factor TOTP Provider

Tonight, I have mostly been installing and testing the Two-Factor TOTP Provider Nextcloud app. After reading the reviews I was slightly concerned that it might break after performing a Nextcloud update. As it happens, the instance I was working on was due an update, so I ran the update and everything worked fine. Tested the app with Google’s and Microsoft’s authenticator apps and it works brilliantly.

One of those days

Some days I’m headed in the right direction
And some days I ain’t even close

Dierks Bentley

Today has definitely felt like the latter. A wicked combination of my own SELinux ignorance and error caching with WP transients has made today a rather frustrating experience. I spent far longer than necessary debugging an error that I’d already fixed. I’m sure there is a lesson to be learned, just not sure what it is.

fish shell and Visual Studio Code terminal

In Visual Studio Code’s integrated terminal the default ctrl+f key binding opens the find/search dialogue. As a fish user, I need ctrl+f to perform command history completion. The default behaviour can be disabled by entering the following into your settings.json file. See: Terminal Basics – Find.

"terminal.integrated.commandsToSkipShell": [
    // Disable terminal's default ctrl+f
    // keybind for fish shell
    "-workbench.action.terminal.focusFind"
]

bat and batcat

After hearing about it on Late Night Linux – Episode 189, I’ve been using bat as a replacement for cat. It’s a nice tool and definitely better than using cat for looking at config files and the like. Interestingly, when you install it on Fedora the command is bat, but on Debian it is batcat. I’ll end up creating an alias for this, but I’m not sure which I prefer.

Syntax highlighting with bat.
Syntax highlighting with bat.