For compiling and installing i3-gaps, basically just follow this guide.
For Termite, you’ll have to install vte-ng, and you can use this guide to do both. NOTE: For the vte-ng dependencies, you’ll also need intltool. Initially, $ termite is returning termite: symbol lookup error: termite: undefined symbol: vte_terminal_set_cursor_position, but everything compiled and installed correctly. So that’s frustrating. Okay, so this got Termite to run, but then zsh is weird, colors aren’t working right and tmux won’t run. I’ll have to fuck with this some other time. For right now though, unusable in PopOS. It works fine on my Debian desktop.
Compiling and installing Polybar is as simple as this Reddit post. If you want to use any of the symbols in the bar and default config, you’ll need to install Siji Symbols. The install from Github is pretty straight forward.
To compile and install Rofi, looks like I get to write the dependency install thingy.
For building with gcc do: $ sudo apt install gcc make autoconf automake pkg-config flex bison check
For external libraries, do: $ sudo apt install libpango1.0-dev libpangocairo-1.0-0 libcairo2-dev libglib2.0-dev librsvg2-dev libstartup-notification0-dev libxkbcommon-dev libxkbcommon-x11-dev libxcb1-dev libxcb-xkb-dev libxcb-randr0-dev libxcb-xinerama0-dev libxcb-util-dev libxcb-ewmh-dev libxcb-icccm4-dev libxcb-xrm-dev
When I tried to build rofi, it failed the Check check. One could run $ ../configure --disable-check, or upgrade Check from https://libcheck.github.io/check/index.html, which is what I did.
Last but not least, installing Compton from the default repo is probably enough, but I want to cover building these elements from source even if most of the dependencies are from the default repos. So here we go. To install the dependencies do: $ sudo apt install libx11-dev libxcomposite-dev libxdamage-dev libxfixes-dev libxext-dev libxrender-dev libxrandr-dev libxinerama-dev pkg-config make x11proto-dev x11-utils libpcre3-dev libconfig-dev libdrm-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libdbus-1-dev asciidoc docbook-xml libxml2-utils libxslt1-dev xsltproc xmlto
This will install a bunch of shit (about 700M worth in the end), but whatever. Storage and bandwidth is cheap now, right? Who remembers the rootboot image you could get that fit on a 1.44M 3 1/2″ floppy? I mean there was no GUI, but still.
So, i3 doesn’t work as expected, but I suspect that is because I recycled dotfiles from another system. And somehow I broke gnome-terminal. WTF. According to the Internet, something jacked with my locale settings? Weird.
After installing everything, gnome-terminal would throw:
Error constructing proxy for org.gnome.Terminal:/org/gnome/Terminal/Factory0: Error calling StartServiceByName for org.gnome.Terminal: Timeout was reached
Almost everything I saw on the Internet pointed to a locale problem. I went through a half dozen “fixes” to know avail. Then, I saw something about a problem with vte. I had installed vte-ng for termite, which didn’t work properly for some reason, so I uninstalled it and rebooted. voila!