do you fiddle with window managers, dotfiles or something else?
I settled on my perfect window manager years ago - suckless’s dwm, a lightweight, tiling wm. (Aside: Before X11 is eventually removed from the Debian repos, I do need to find a satisfactory alternative to dwm that will run on Wayland. But I’m not in a rush for that. Alternatively, I’ll have to fork X11 and maintain my own branch of it, or something…… I don’t relish that prospect!)
Rather than using the version of dwm from Debians repository, I build and install dwm from source via the suckless git repo. I’ve added their official system-tray patch, plus a ton of my own modifications. Mostly custom keybinds for firing up certain bits of software that I use a lot (File-manager, web browser, libre-office etc etc). Enabling/disabling my touchpad, starting/stopping conky, controlling media playback, volume etc.
And I’ve re-jigged the order of the different desktop modes so monocle mode is the default, followed by tiling mode, with floating mode last. And I’ve hidden the top-bar. The list goes on….
So I regularly update and rebuild/reinstall dwm from source. Meaning I have to update the master branch, then merge the latest changes from the master branch into my custom branch and ensure that none of my customisations have been adversely affected, before building and installing.
I regularly add or change keybinds in dwm too. Which also requires a rebuild and reinstall. For example, shift + win + f is a shortcut I use to fire up my file-manager. For years that was dolphin, but when kde5 came out - theming was a bit of an issue on dwm. I did fix it, but then I noticed that dolphin was getting slow to start and was performing rather sluggishly. Which annoyed me, so I swapped out dolphin for pcmanfm, which starts up immediately and is really snappy.
I’ve got a number of other pieces of software that are built and installed from source too. They require regular similar manual updates. Dmenu, sent, tabbed, cmus, tong (a game that’s both Tetris and Pong)…. Numerous others….
And then there are all of the dotfiles. Like my .vimrc, .bashrc, tmux.conf etc.
Again, I’m constantly tweaking things to allow me to be more productive and efficient.