For a multitude of reasons I have decided to stop using github where possible. (I will of course continue to be involved with projects which still reside here.)
Please see my dotfiles repo on gitlab!
The intention is to make it pretty easy to reproduce my linux installs with only what is in this repository.
Note that a lot of helpful information on which programs to use can be found at privacytools.io.
A useful list of applications and plugins with vim-like control bindings can be found at Big Pile of Vim-Like.
I've made myself a simple installer program in Julia, which can be found in this
repository under Installer. Enter this with install.sh.
For the most part everything described here should be more-or-less distro agnostic, but it'll probably be easiest on Arch branches. Currently the one known
major headache on Ubuntu is that on Ubuntu one has to compile polybar. This is a big pain because polybar depends on libxcb and in the Ubuntu repos that
library is split into about a billion different packages, so you'll be spending a good amount of time figuring out which ones you need.
I use prezto which runs on zsh. It has lots of useful features, is easy to configure and actually reasonably fast.
Note that tough it must be loaded in .zshrc there is separate configuration in .zpreztorc.
Here is a list of some useful applications that I would like to remember exist
The ultimate terminal emulator. Highly configurable, GPU enabled and written in Rust.
See the .config/alacritty/alacritty.yml config.
A vim-like browser. Configuration for it in this repo. The major disadvantage is of
course the lack of add-ons. Note that I have switched entirely from qutebrowser to
Firefox+tridactyl because I could no longer survive without the Firefox add-on ecosystem.
This is pretty crucial for i3. arandr is a simple GUI that lets you arrange the layout of your display output and change resolutions. arandr works by
generating a 1-line script containing the necessary xrandr command. To make this script execute whenever i3 starts you can just put a line in your
config.
This is for launching applications and terminal sessions.
This can detect your display configuration and apply saved settings. It is also useful for manually saving profiles.
This is a window compositor that runs in window managers such as i3. It needs to be launched during i3 init (see i3 conf). There are settings in the
compton.conf that disable the transparency of tabs (so you don't see through to all your tabs) but this will only work in i3-gaps.
This is a simple file browser a bit like from the DOS days. The main usefulness of this is that you can use it to preview all sorts of things including images
right in the terminal. Note that you should use the config files found in this repo, and you may need w3m installed for previews to work.
This is a command line interface for the network manager. Note also that nmtui opens a little DOS-like menu that lets you open connections to new wifi
networks. Typically I will use nmcli to manage my wifi, e.g. nmcli connection up tristero5.
This is a very useful tool for telling you about your hardware configuration. For example, inxi -G tells you about your graphics setup.
Just what it sounds like, shows output of system sensors. Gives temperatures and fan speeds where available.
This is a nice utility for taking screenshots. Note that my i3 keybindings for this by default are Print for taking a full screenshot, $mod+Print for
just the current window, and Shift+Print for a little box that you can select with the mouse. The output will be put in ~/Pictures/screenshots.
This is for controlling audio output, usually the OS will use this by default. I need to make keybindings within i3 at some point. In the meantime, you can
increase or decrease volume with amixer set Master x%±.
This is a TUI for controlling audio devices. Best way to control volumes of individual devices such as headphones and mics. See also pavucontrol for a full
GUI, sometimes it's easier for things like USB headsets.
A really nice minimalistic media player.
An amazing little pacman utility for browsing things like dependency trees, file locations and config files. Also see pacli.
Binary called mpsyt, this is a nice way of browsing YouTube from the command line and watching videos with VLC, mpv or another player.
Vim-like PDF viewer. On Arch, be sure to install zathura-pdf-mupdf.
See hideous website here. This is a vim-like mail client I'm considering setting up.
This is the coolest version of top that I've seen. It even has the dracula theme
built-in. Get it with pip install bpytop.
A TUI kernel monitor. This is really useful because it shows a lot of stuff which is otherwise hard to find.
The following are required for my default setup
i3-gaps(equivalentlyi3should work just fine) (here is a brief guide for installing on Debian)polybarrofifehautorandrttf-font-awesome(these are icon fonts used by thepolybar)nvim(my default editor I use for everything)
Currently the only non-standard directories that will be expected by something are
~/Pictures/backgrounds/(byfehfor backgrounds)~/Pictures/screenshots/(byscrotfor screenshots)
Currently I'm using the dracula everywhere mostly because it's unbelievably well-supported and, unlike many color
schemes, actually has good enough contrast for me to be happy with it in vim. I'd basically describe it as "neon that doesn't look too 80's". The dracula
colors are currently hard-coded into my init.vim (via the dracula.vim package), i3/config and polybar/config, which is certainly not ideal. The only
place a user would need to change the colors manually is on the terminal itself. I use
the alacritty terminal, so terminal colors are defined in
~/.config/alacritty/alacritty.yml.
See this useful color configurator for i3.
It is expected that you keep your backgrounds in $HOME/Pictures/backgrounds. The .fehbg will randomly assign them when the session starts (called by i3).
I like to use a huge number of different backgrounds, the only rule is that they all be somehow "sci-fi" themed (especially spaceships!).
Hack. Should have good unicode support, but the way fonts get patched seems to work out much better in Arch than Debian.
- Arch Package:
ttf-hack - Debian Package:
fonts-hack
The current situation with the colors is highly unsatisfactory. There are some nice tools for assigning colors using images as references using clustering of the pixels such as pywal but frankly the results don't often look very nice, especially for doing real work. At some point I'm going to carefully create my own color scheme (I've found that this is much harder than it sounds). I will fork the aforementioned dracula repos and insert my colors. Hopefully I will come up with some way to clean up the process a bit when I do so.
My new colors will probably be some sort of bluish thing with cyan and orange highlights.
The dot files for the Manjaro i3 community setup can be found
here. This is probably a good starting point for a great
many things. More generally, default Manjaro desktop settings can be found at https://gitlab.manjaro.org/profiles-and_settings/desktop-settings .
I use Julia extensively, in the long run I expect it to be much more intimately intertwined with this setup. Note that for now the
Julia binaries are expected to be in /opt/julia/bin (at some point I will have more permanent system-wide environment variables). You can use $mod+F1 to
launch a new Julia REPL.
Slowly mankind frees itself from the oppressive Tyranny of Google. A few programs are available which turns some of their own tactics (i.e. aggregation) against them:
- Invidious (repo) is an alternative front-end to YouTube.
- Nitter is an alternative front-end to Twitter (I despise twitter, but sometimes interesting people post useful things there).
- Invidation is a Firefox plugin for re-directing YouTube and twitter links to invidious and nitter. (Note that by default this also passes lots of parameters in the URL that will override your invidious settings, but these can be disabled in settings.)
- Privacy Badger: Tracking blocker from EFF.
- uBlock Origin: The best ad blocker.
- Invidition: Plugin for re-directing YouTube and twitter links to invidious and nitter (mentioned above).
- CanvasBlocker: Plugin for blocking some fingerprinting.
- User-Agent Switcher: Plugin for managing user agent strings.
- LessPass: Stateless password generation.
- Tridactyl: Vim-like functionality in firefox. Almost on-par with qutebrowser, but is a bit fragile. Configs are found in this repo.
Here is a list of useful things that I often forget how to do:
xset s $NSECONDS: Sets the timer for the screen to be deactivated to$NSECONDS.
sudo fdisk -l: Lists mounted disk volumes. Useful for finding, for example USB flash drives.dd bs=4M if=name_of_iso_file.iso of=/dev/sdX: Write an ISO file to the drive at/dev/sdX. (Unmount drive withumountfirst.)
ldconfig -p: Lists all libraries in library paths. For example doldconfig -p | grep libsdlto find SDL libraries.ldd: Lists all the libraries that the binary links to.objdump -p: Lists all libraries that a binary links to among other things. Note you can also dolddbut this may result in code execution.
- You can start a new X windows session from one of the other terminals (i.e.
ctrl-alt-Fnby doingstartxfrom that terminal. - Wayland is actually a protocol that's implemented by the desktop environments, so there
is no equivalent to
startx. You can try running it from e.g. GNOME by doinggnome-session --session gnome-wayland.