Customize Vivaldi Browser: Custom Speed Dial Thumbnails

📅 February 21, 2020
After writing a bash script that matches the Vivaldi background to the Linux desktop wallpaper for a transparent effect, why not make the speed dial icons/thumbnails match as well?

Using bash and ImageMagick, we can modify speed dial icons to be monochrome, grayscale, color-adjusted to match the wallpaper, add a vignette, or almost any other image processing effect available. It depends most upon personal preference, so we will see how to set up Vivaldi and Linux to achieve this.

Customize Vivaldi Browser: Match Vivaldi Wallpaper with Linux Desktop Wallpaper

📅 February 18, 2020
“How can I make the Speed Dial wallpaper in the Vivaldi Browser match the Linux desktop wallpaper?”

Vivaldi is a great free web browser, and it can customized in many ways for a user-tailored browsing environment. One such customization is the Start Page/Speed Dial wallpaper. One fancy effect is to make the Vivaldi wallpaper match the current desktop wallpaper for a “see-through” effect.

In Windows, this is easily accomplished within the Vivaldi Start Page settings, but in Linux, there is no such option, forcing us to set the Vivaldi wallpaper manually.

Is there a way to make Vivialdi match the current desktop wallpaper in Linux?

Yes, there is! It involves a little preparation and a bash script, but the result produces the same effect.

Bash IFS – What is the Internal Field Separator?

📅 February 16, 2020
An internal field separator is a character (or set of characters) used as a delimiter to tell when a piece of data ends before reading the next piece of data.

Bash provides the environment variable IFS to store this special value. Why is this important?