Digital Workspace

I completely redid my desktop setup with the goal of improving it for streams and screencasts. Overall my goals were to remove as much information that wasn't critical as necessary. This include icons, scrollbars, titlebars, and more.

Tiling window manager

I moved to yabai, a tiling window manager for macos. This allows me to build out the space you see around and between the windows, giving a cleaner feel to the whole setup. I used one of the screened back rainbow images I have laying around for this sort of thing as a desktop background, which is why it looks like the space is rainbow colored.

Yabai also lets me remove the dropshadow and borders on each of the windows, yielding a cleaner look as well.

iTerm 2

If you look at iTerm, you'll notice that I've removed the title bar completely. This is something I've had for awhile now, having used Magnet in the past to position the window, but it works significantly better with a tiling window manager.

If iTerm has a tab or split-pane, tab bars do show up and I have those randomly colored.

# randomize colors of iterm titlebars
RAND1=$[${RANDOM}%256]
RAND2=$[${RANDOM}%256]
RAND3=$[${RANDOM}%256]
printf -- $"\033]6;1;bg;red;brightness;$RAND1\a\033]6;1;bg;green;brightness;$RAND2\a\033]6;1;bg;blue;brightness;$RAND3\a"

I use starship with most of the features disabled for my terminal prompt. I find having a shorter second line to type commands on makes it easier to follow on screencasts and livestreams and I've come to like it.

Browser

I've mostly kept the browser the same as usual, although I've hidden all of my extensions and made sure the bookmarks bar isn't showing.

VSCode

I turn off so much of the VSCode UI. Here's a few of the most relevant settings including some that aren't technically supported to get the scrollbars to disappear.

{
    "editor.overviewRulerBorder": false,
    "editor.scrollbar.verticalScrollbarSize": 0,
    "window.title": " ",
    "editor.scrollbar.horizontal": "hidden",
    "editor.scrollbar.vertical": "hidden",
    "workbench.sideBar.location": "right",
    "editor.minimap.enabled": false
}

I also turn off all popups because I find that they obscure the actual content when I'm writing code on stream. They feel like ads when I see them now, after having them turned off for so long.