**If you are at a question of “what is ricing?”, then buddy you aren’t alone here.
Basically, Ricing is “Making your Desktop Beautiful or good looking”. Many people even would not have heard of this term but yes something like this exists. And many people do ricing for keeping their system look clean and tidy. Also if you feel like ricing as a waste of time or non-sense thing, then I should ask you this.
“Why Do you clean your house and make it look good?”
These things relate with each other (if you don’t then think upon it).
Am myself not a ricing expert and am here at this topic just for some beginner friends. A Rice is a term used to describe a person’s Unix desktop look.
If you want to look upon some examples of ricing you can have a look at r/unixporn on reddit. It has 100’s of rice’s uploaded by some Unix/Linux user’s.
How Do I Get started with Ricing?
Well, If you want to get started in ricing then you just need some command line knowledge and of course a Linux system installed. And as always I again say,“Thing’s can be learnt better with experiencing them”.
**Is a Window Manager compulsory for Ricing?"
A window manager is just a window manager which handles the placement or appearance of the windows. So, the beauty you see in different rices isn’t actually the window manager. The things which make the rice beautiful are mostly the cli programs used.
There are two types of window manager’s:-
• Tiling Window Manager
• Floating Window Manager
Some examples of window manager’s are i3-gaps, Bspwm, Awesomewm, OpenBox, herbsluftwm, xfwm4 and etc…
What are the things which make a rice look beautiful?
This is most important question here. This varies on the user whether he wants more bling in his system or a normal good looking system.
There are a ton of programs for doing that. We’ll get to those thing’s in points.
• A Color Scheme:
Can say this as a important part of your rice. A Color Scheme is a
Simple Color palette which is applied in your terminal your bar and
all the other things you use. For example [Dracula Theme] (https://draculatheme.com), Nord Theme or
gruvbox etc.
• Compositor:
A compositor manages the aesthetic in a window manager. Like the
cool looking blue effect or round corners or terminal transparency.
All these things are handled by a compositor.
• CLI or GUI Programs:
Cli Programs are must in a rice. They can be anything like
ranger(Cli based file manager or neofetch(very common to linux
users) or Shell-Color-Scripts. All these programs make the window
manager look good
• Bar’s :
Of course everyone needs to have a look at the time when working
and on a system. So, We also may need a status bar for that. It can
be Polybar, Tint2, Lemonbar, yabar(For Mac) and etc… Polybar is
the most used bar program.
• You .config folder
A point to remember here is all the configurations files in your
Linux system are stored at .config in you home folder and all
the Desktop Environment and the Window Manager configurations are
stored here.
Some Important Links
https://jie-fang.github.io/blog/basics-of-ricing
And all the other people who think that it is a waste of time then they are free to consider that at last everyone has different views and thought’s :).
All the user’s who are reading blog or are already Doing ricing can post there setups here in our forum itself. Also you should mention the Window Manager name, and All the cli or bar programs used in the rice.
