Cutefish

Cutefish is a Desktop Environment written originally for the CutefishOS (old link) project that has a focus on simplicity, beauty, and practicality. It is written using the Qt5 framework to provide a simple, universal look and feel.

Installation

Cutefish can be installed with the cutefish group.

Starting

Cutefish can either be started with a display manager or manually from the console. The display manager included with Cutefish is SDDM.

Graphically

Enable sddm.service.

Manually

The cutefish-session can be called from your xinitrc or directly on the startx command line.

Configuration

Cutefish configuration can be done mainly in the settings application pinned on the dock.

Keybindings

Cutefish does not natively support keybindings, but using the sxhkd daemon we can add custom keybindings.

It can be started through a custom session:

/usr/bin/cutefish-session-sxhkd

#!/bin/bash
nohup sxhkd & 
cutefish-session

/usr/share/xsessions/cutefish-session-sxhkd.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=cutefish-session-sxhkd
TryExec=cutefish-session-sxhkd
Name=Cutefish Desktop (with sxhkd)
Keywords=session-sxhkd
Comment=session-sxhkd

$HOME/.config/sxhkd/sxhkdrc

ctrl + alt + t
    cutefish-terminal

super + d
    cutefish-launcher

Terminal colorscheme

Cutefish Terminal does not natively have a built-in color scheme switcher. We can however edit the source code to include our own colorscheme.

Start with retrieving the PKGBUILD for cutefish-terminal with the ABS.

Edit the theme, either in the building step or manually, which is either Cutefish-Dark.colorscheme or Cutefish-Light.colorscheme in /path/to/the/sources/qmltermwidget/lib/color-schemes/.

To avoid repeating this step at every update, it would be prudent to create a patch to reuse it afterwards.