A long time ago I wrote up some basic customizations of Cinnamon, shortly after I started using Cinnamon (also) on my laptop of the time. Since then, the laptop got replaced with another one and various things changed in both the land of Cinnamon and my customizations (eg, also). Today I feel like writing down a general outline of my current customizations, which fall into a number of areas from the modest but visible to the large but invisible.

The large but invisible category is that just like on my main fvwm-based desktop environment, I use xcape (plus a custom Cinnamon key binding for a weird key combination) to invoke my custom dmenu setup (1, 2) when I tap the CapsLock key. I have dmenu set to come up horizontally on the top of the display, which Cinnamon conveniently leaves alone in the default setup (it has its bar at the bottom). And of course I make CapsLock into an additional Control key when held.

(On the laptop I'm using a very old method of doing this. On more modern Cinnamon setups in virtual machines, I do this with Settings → Keyboard → Layout → Options, and then in the CapsLock section set CapsLock to be an additional Ctrl key.)

To start xcape up and do some other things, like load X resources, I have a personal entry in Settings → Startup Applications that runs a script in my ~/bin/X11. I could probably do this in a more modern way with an assortment of .desktop files in ~/.config/autostart (which is where my 'Startup Applications' setting actually wind up) that run each thing individually or perhaps some systemd user units. But the current approach works and is easy to modify if I want to add or remove things (I can just edit the script).

I have a number of Cinnamon 'applets' installed on my laptop and my other Cinnamon VM setups. The ones I have everywhere are Spices Update and Shutdown Applet, the latter because if I tell the (virtual) machine to log me off, shut down, or restart, I generally don't want to be nagged about it. On my laptop I also have CPU Frequency Applet (set to only display a summary) and CPU Temperature Indicator, for no compelling reason. In all environments I also pin launchers for Firefox and (Gnome) Terminal to the Cinnamon bottom bar, because I start both of them often enough. I position the Shutdown Applet on the left side, next to the launchers, because I think of it as a peculiar 'launcher' instead of an applet (on the right).

(The default Cinnamon keybindings also start a terminal with Ctrl + Alt + T, which you can still find through the same process from several years ago provided that you don't cleverly put something in .local/share/glib-2.0/schemas and then run 'glib-compile-schemas .' in that directory. If I was a smarter bear, I'd understand what I should have done when I was experimenting with something.)

On my virtual machines with Cinnamon, I don't bother with the whole xcape and dmenu framework, but I do set up the applets and the launchers and fix CapsLock.

(This entry was sort of inspired by someone I know who just became a Linux desktop user (after being a long time terminal user).)

Sidebar: My Cinnamon 'window manager' custom keybindings

I have these (on my laptop) and perpetually forget about them, so I'm going to write them down now so perhaps that will change.

move-to-corner-ne=['<Alt><Super>Right']
move-to-corner-nw=['<Alt><Super>Left']
move-to-corner-se=['<Primary><Alt><Super>Right']
move-to-corner-sw=['<Primary><Alt><Super>Left']
move-to-side-e=['<Shift><Alt><Super>Right']
move-to-side-n=['<Shift><Alt><Super>Up']
move-to-side-s=['<Shift><Alt><Super>Down']
move-to-side-w=['<Shift><Alt><Super>Left']

I have some other keybindings on the laptop but they're even less important, especially once I added dmenu.