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Post-install configuration

Everything in ~/nixos-config describes what software your machine carries. How your desktop looks and behaves — scaling, panel layout, keyboard shortcuts — is a different kind of thing: personal, per-user state that COSMIC keeps in your home directory (under ~/.config/cosmic). You set it once by clicking through Settings, and it survives every rebuild and every GISNIX update, because nothing on this page touches the flake at all.

This page walks through the settings worth visiting in your first session, including two commands GISNIX ships specifically so you can put them on a key.

Display scaling

Open Settings → Displays. Each connected display has its own Scale setting, adjustable in 25% steps. On a HiDPI laptop panel — anything around 2K resolution at 13–14 inches — 125% or 150% is usually where text becomes comfortable without everything turning cartoonishly large. External monitors keep their own scale, so a sharp laptop panel and an ordinary 27-inch desktop screen can each be set to what suits them.

The same page handles resolution, refresh rate, and the arrangement of multiple displays (drag the rectangles so the layout on screen matches the layout on your desk).

Arranging the panel and dock

COSMIC splits the bar into two parts, each configured under Settings → Desktop:

  • The panel — the strip with the app library button, workspaces, clock, and status applets. Desktop → Panel controls its position, size, and which applets appear; the applet list lets you add, remove, and reorder them.
  • The dock — the row of application launchers. Desktop → Dock controls the same for it.

To put an application on the dock, find it in the app library (the top-left panel button, carrying the Kartoza logo on a GISNIX machine) or start it, then right-click its icon and pin it. Drag pinned icons along the dock to put them in the order your hands expect. QGIS, a terminal, a browser and a file manager make a sensible opening set for a GIS workstation; everything else is one app-library search away.

Custom keyboard shortcuts

COSMIC can bind any command to any key. The controls live at Settings → Input devices → Keyboard shortcuts → Custom shortcuts; Add shortcut asks for a name, the command to run, and the key combination.

Two things to know before you add one:

  1. Give the absolute path to the command. The shortcut runs outside your shell, so /run/current-system/sw/bin/screenshot-trigger works where a bare screenshot-trigger may not. Everything GISNIX installs lives under /run/current-system/sw/bin/.
  2. The two capture commands below end in -trigger and -toggle for a reason. A COSMIC custom shortcut cannot launch the interactive region picker directly — a compositor bug (pop-os/cosmic-epoch#2481) means a picker started straight from a keybind never gets control of the pointer, and the selection silently does nothing. So the bound command only pokes a small background service (screenshot-listener), which owns the picker and does the actual capture. Bind the trigger, not the underlying tool.

Screenshot with annotation

Bind /run/current-system/sw/bin/screenshot-trigger — Ctrl+4 is a comfortable choice, sitting right above the home row:

A COSMIC custom shortcut binding screenshot-trigger to Ctrl+4

Press the key and a crosshair appears; drag out the region you want (or press Escape to change your mind). The capture opens immediately in Satty for annotation — arrows, boxes, highlights, text — and the result is saved to ~/Pictures/Screenshots.

The command takes an optional mode argument, so you can bind variants to their own keys:

Command What it captures
screenshot-trigger Drag out a region (the default)
screenshot-trigger region-repeat The same region as last time, no picker — for a series of captures of one on-screen area
screenshot-trigger screen The whole screen

GIF screen recording

Bind /run/current-system/sw/bin/record-gif-toggle — Ctrl+5 pairs naturally with the screenshot key beside it:

A COSMIC custom shortcut named Record Gif binding record-gif-toggle to Ctrl+5

One key does both ends of the job. Press it once: the crosshair appears, you drag out a region, and recording starts (a notification confirms the size). Press it again: recording stops, the video is converted to a GIF, and the file lands in ~/Videos/Recordings — the folder opens so you can grab it. A second copy at half the dimensions is saved beside it (…-half.gif), sized for chat windows and issue trackers where the full-size one is too heavy. Short GIFs of a map interaction, a dialog sequence, or a bug in motion drop straight into an issue tracker or a chat window where a video file would be a chore.

If you would rather have a fixed-length recording, an argument caps the duration in seconds — record-gif-toggle 30 stops itself after half a minute if you have not stopped it first.

If pressing the key does nothing

The background service that owns the region picker may not be running. Check it with:

systemctl --user status screenshot-listener

Logging out and back in restarts it.

On-screen keystrokes

With the desktop-multimedia bundle on board, bind /run/current-system/sw/bin/wshowkeys-toggle — Ctrl+6 continues the row. One press overlays every keystroke at the bottom of the screen, each character drawn as a keycap (the Libertinus Keyboard face, SIL OFL); press again to turn it off. Made for pairing with the GIF recorder: viewers see what you typed, not just what happened. Set WSHOWKEYS_FONT (a Pango spec like monospace 28) before toggling if you want a different face.

Finding the cursor

Also from desktop-multimedia: bind /run/current-system/sw/bin/find-cursor — Ctrl+7 keeps the row going. It toggles click highlighting: press once and every mouse click from then on flashes a growing yellow circle around the pointer; press again to turn it off. For presentations and screencasts on big or many monitors, where the viewer needs to see where you clicked.

Click highlighting needs the input group

Reading mouse clicks means reading input devices directly, which the Wayland session does not expose to ordinary programs. Add the user to the input group on hosts where you want this — users.users.<name>.extraGroups = [ "input" ]; — and rebuild. It is not granted fleet-wide on purpose: input membership also lets the user's programs read the keyboard. find-cursor tells you if the group is missing rather than silently doing nothing.

Other commands worth a key

Anything on the system can be bound the same way. One that earns a spot is /run/current-system/sw/bin/kanata-toggle, which suspends and resumes the keyboard remapping layer — useful when a game or a remote-desktop session wants your keyboard raw.

Appearance

Settings → Desktop → Appearance switches between light and dark mode and sets the accent colour; Desktop → Wallpaper does what it says. COSMIC's tiling can be toggled per workspace from the tiling applet on the panel (or Super+Y) if you prefer windows that arrange themselves. The defaults are all reasonable; adjust what bothers you and leave the rest.

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