Prettier fonts in KDE

If you’re a KDE user and have always envied Gnome for its font rendering (especially with fonts like Ubuntu and Ubuntu Mono), read on.

All you need to do is select ‘Enabled’ for System Settings > Application Appearance > Fonts > Use anti-aliasing.  Click on the Configure button and set Hinting style to ‘Slight’.  If you like ClearType style font rendering, enable subpixel rendering too.

Any program that’s opened after this change will use the new font rendering settings.  So you may want to restart your open apps or logout and log back in.

Disabling Ubuntu menu proxy when not using Unity

Does seeing messages like this on your terminal annoy you?

** (gvim:8016): WARNING **: Unable to create Ubuntu Menu Proxy: Timeout was reached

It sure does annoy me.  Turns out, it’s because the app you’re running is trying to connect its menus to Unity’s “global menu” (or whatever that’s called).  The way to fix this problem would be to disable Unity menu proxy when you’re not using Unity.  Add this to your shell’s startup script (.bashrc, .zshrc, etc):

if [[ $DESKTOP_SESSION != "ubuntu" && $DESKTOP_SESSION != "ubuntu-2d" ]]
then
  export UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0
fi