The ricer’s toolkit
A tool earns a place here by being free or fairly priced, actively maintained and themeable from a config file you can keep in your dotfiles.
38 tools7 groupsupdated
Window managers and compositors
5 toolsPick Wayland or X11 first: the bar, launcher and notifications you choose next follow that choice.
Hyprland
Our pickVisit HyprlandA dynamic tiling Wayland compositor with animations, visual effects and plugins, and a config that reloads the moment you save it. For ricers who want motion.
Sway
Visit SwayA tiling Wayland compositor built as a drop-in replacement for i3 that works with existing i3 configs. The steady way to move an i3 setup to Wayland.
niri
Visit niriA scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor: windows sit in columns on an endless strip, so opening one never resizes the rest. Has an overview and screenshot UI.
i3
Visit i3A tiling window manager for X11, written from scratch for advanced users, with a plain-text config and a detailed user’s guide. On Wayland, Sway is its twin.
AeroSpace
Visit AeroSpaceAn i3-like tiling window manager for macOS, set up in a plain-text config that fits in your dotfiles. Still in public beta, so expect breaking changes.
Bars, launchers and widgets
6 toolsWaybar, a launcher and a notification daemon cover most setups; reach for eww or Quickshell when you want widgets no bar ships with.
Waybar
Our pickVisit WaybarA status bar for Wayland compositors, set up in a JSON config and styled with CSS. Its modules know the workspaces of Sway, Hyprland, niri and River.
Quickshell
Visit QuickshellA QtQuick toolkit for building your own bar, widgets and lock screen in QML. More work than a ready-made bar; in return, the whole shell is yours to design.
eww
Visit ewwWidgets for any window manager, written in its own yuck config and styled with SCSS: dashboards, sidebars, music controls. Releases are rare these days.
rofi
Visit rofiA launcher, window switcher and dmenu replacement with deep theming in its own .rasi files. Version 2.0 added official Wayland support.
fuzzel
Visit fuzzelA small app launcher and fuzzy finder for Wayland, inspired by rofi and dmenu, with icons, a dmenu mode and a plain ini config.
dunst
Visit dunstA lightweight notification daemon with no toolkit dependencies, themed from one config file that reloads while it runs.
Terminals and shells
6 toolsEvery terminal here takes a sixteen-color scheme from its config; Starship needs a Nerd Font for its icons.
kitty
Our pickVisit kittyA fast, GPU-based terminal with tabs, splits and its own graphics protocol for images. The built-in themes kitten previews and switches color schemes.
Ghostty
Visit GhosttyA GPU-accelerated terminal with a native interface on each platform and hundreds of built-in color themes, with separate themes for light and dark mode.
Alacritty
Visit AlacrittyA fast OpenGL terminal with sensible defaults and one config file. It leaves tabs and splits to tmux or your window manager.
foot
Visit footA fast, lightweight terminal made for Wayland. Its server mode lets one process host every window, so new terminals open quickly.
fish
Visit fishA shell with autosuggestions, syntax highlighting and tab completions that work without setup, plus 24-bit color and a web page for picking its colors.
Starship
Visit StarshipA fast prompt for bash, zsh, fish, PowerShell and more, configured in one TOML file, with ready-made presets to start from.
Editors
6 toolsNeovim
Our pickVisit NeovimA Vim-based editor you configure in Lua from one init.lua, with language servers and tree-sitter built in. Most popular color schemes have a Neovim port.
LazyVim
Visit LazyVimA Neovim setup on lazy.nvim that turns Neovim into a full IDE and stays easy to customize and extend. Needs Neovim 0.11.2 or later.
Helix
Visit HelixA modal terminal editor in Rust with multiple selections, tree-sitter and language servers working with no setup. There is no plugin system yet.
Zed
Visit ZedAn open-source editor built in Rust with its own GPU-drawn interface. AI is optional: the free plan covers the editor, and Pro adds hosted models.
VSCodium
Visit VSCodiumVS Code built from Microsoft’s MIT-licensed source with telemetry turned off. Extensions come from Open VSX, and a few Microsoft-only ones won’t run.
GNU Emacs
Visit GNU EmacsAn extensible editor you shape in Emacs Lisp, with Org for notes and plans built in. Doom Emacs is a popular starting config with Vim keys.
Palettes
5 toolsEach of these is ported to most terminals, editors and bars; for a palette drawn from your own wallpaper, use the Generator.
Catppuccin
Our pickVisit CatppuccinA pastel scheme in four flavors, from the light Latte to the dark Mocha, with 26 named colors each and more than 450 community ports.
Rosé Pine
Visit Rosé PineA soft, muted palette in three variants, two dark and the light Dawn, ported to more than 230 apps.
tokyonight.nvim
Visit tokyonight.nvimThe Neovim port of Tokyo Night in four styles (storm, moon, night and day), with matching extras for kitty, Alacritty, foot, tmux, fish and dozens more.
Dracula
Visit DraculaA dark scheme with free, MIT-licensed themes for more than 400 apps. The paid Dracula Pro adds more variants, a light one among them, and four coding fonts.
Tinted Theming
Visit Tinted ThemingThe Base16 and Base24 specs with 230+ schemes and templates for 70+ apps, so one scheme file can theme a terminal, an editor and a window manager together.
Fonts
5 toolsBars, prompts and file managers draw their icons from a Nerd Font; each free font here also comes in a Nerd Font build.
JetBrains Mono
Our pickVisit JetBrains MonoA free, open-source coding font with code ligatures and eight weights, each with an italic. The NL version drops the ligatures if you prefer plain symbols.
Nerd Fonts
Visit Nerd FontsMore than 70 popular coding fonts patched with over 10,000 icons for bars, prompts and file managers, plus a patcher for adding them to your own font.
Iosevka
Visit IosevkaA narrow coding font you can build to taste: 19 stylistic sets and more than 140 configurable characters, with or without ligatures.
Monaspace
Visit MonaspaceFive coding font families, from a neo-grotesque sans to handwriting, by GitHub Next and Lettermatic. Texture healing evens out the spacing of code.
MonoLisa
Visit MonoLisaA paid coding font made for legibility, with ten weights, ligatures and OpenType features, and a matching proportional Text family. Try it free first.
Dotfile managers
5 toolsA Git repo and Stow are enough for one machine; chezmoi or yadm earn their keep once your setup runs on several.
chezmoi
Our pickVisit chezmoiKeeps dotfiles in step across machines, with templates for per-machine differences, password manager lookups and encryption. Ships as a single binary.
GNU Stow
Visit GNU StowA symlink farm manager: keep each app’s config in its own folder of a Git repo, and Stow links it into place. Small and long-lived.
yadm
Visit yadmA dotfiles manager that wraps Git, so your files stay where they live. Adds alternate files per OS or host, encryption and a bootstrap script.
Home Manager
Visit Home ManagerDeclares your user environment, from packages to app configs, in Nix. Runs as a NixOS or nix-darwin module, or standalone on NixOS and macOS.
Dotbot
Visit DotbotA small tool that bootstraps dotfiles from a YAML or JSON config, usually added to your repo as a Git submodule. Links files and runs setup commands.