Fontmatrix is pretty cool, VolWheel rocks!

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Edit: Unfortunately, the images originally included in this post are gone, because of hosting problems in late 2009. My apologies.

I don’t use enough fonts for it to be of any real benefit to me, but if you’re one of those people who gets all giddy over font collections, Fontmatrix might be an option for you.

I installed the svn version from a PKGBUILD posted here and gave it a whirl. Herein you shall see my meager font collection. …

It has a really slick selection system, and a full preview of your whole font reel, and if you have a sample text you want to use as a preview, it can do that too. Font information, glyph previews and some way of activating and deactivating fonts (I didn’t try that). This would have been a godsend in my old job, where I had 200+ fonts on a machine and I had to try and keep track of them.

But of course now, I really only use Dejavu Sans, and the others are required either by the system or a single program. So it’s only of vague use to me (which is just as well, because I don’t care for the qt4 interface 😛 ), but the best part was, it compiled and ran without a hitch, so I don’t feel obligated to hunt for bug reports or anything! See, my new rules are working just fine! 😀

After that, I have to mention VolWheel. I don’t use a panel, which means I don’t have a system tray, but I installed pypanel for about 20 minutes so I could play with that one.

Very cool — it’s great to be able to control the volume with the mouse wheel. I know, Gnome users can do that without even blinking, but we Openboxers have little things that amuse us … like a tray icon that controls the volume. 🙄

Ubuntu users can wait for Hardy and hope someone adopts these packages, or you can inspect the PKGBUILD files for advice on what to install, find the corresponding -dev package and compile from scratch. Don’t be intimidated; that should be fairly easy if you look inside the PKGBUILDs. 😉

2 thoughts on “Fontmatrix is pretty cool, VolWheel rocks!”

  1. Onyros

    Nice, I’ll have to try it out! I’m currently using volume.app, a simple dockapp which auto-hides neatly and all. Problem is when it’s not auto-hidden… the darned thing is, euphemistically, not pretty.

    As for AUR… that’s one of the great Arch features, in my view. Yeah, I normally don’t have many problems compiling stuff, but creating packages with the makepkg system is way simpler, faster. And it’s pretty cool, too.

    Maybe the Ubuntu devs could think of something similar?

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  2. Pingback: Volwheel saves the day « Motho ke motho ka botho

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