amckay1 / dotfiles

A backup of my dot files.

dotfiles

The intention is to make it pretty easy to reproduce my linux installs with only what is in this repository.

Distro

I've very quickly come to prefer Manjaro for a number of reasons, in particular that it seems to have amazingly worry-free hardware setup even for nVidia. Historically I've used Ubuntu quite a lot, but lately am getting rather fed up with the update model among other things.

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.

Applications

Here is a list of some useful applications that I would like to remember exist

qutebrowser

A vim-like browser. Initially I was just using a vim plugin called tridactyl for firefox, but I was surprised how well qutebrowser works. I have a configuration for it here. The one major disadvantage that I can see is that the ad blocking needs improvement.

arandr

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.

autorandr

This can detect your display configuration and apply saved settings. It is also useful for manually saving profiles.

compton

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.

ranger

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.

nmcli

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.

inxi

This is a very useful tool for telling you about your hardware configuration. For example, inxi -G tells you about your graphics setup.

sensors

Just what it sounds like, shows output of system sensors. Gives temperatures and fan speeds where available.

scrot

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.

amixer

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%±.

alsamixer

This is a TUI for controlling audio devices. Best way to control volumes of individual devices such as headphones and mics.

mpv

A really nice minimalistic media player.

pacui

An amazing little pacman utility for browsing things like dependency trees, file locations and config files. Also see pacli.

mps-youtube

Binary called mpsyt, this is a nice way of browsing YouTube from the command line and watching videos with VLC, mpv or another player.

zathura

Vim-like PDF viewer. On Arch, be sure to install zathura-pdf-mupdf.

neomutt

See hideous website here. This is a vim-like mail client I'm considering setting up.

Required

The following are required for my default setup

• i3-gaps (equivalently i3 should work just fine) (here is a brief guide for installing on Debian)
• polybar
• dmenu_recency (alternatively dmenu is fine, but be sure to change i3 config)
• feh
• autorandr
• ttf-font-awesome (these are icon fonts used by the polybar)
• nvim (my default editor I use for everything)

Directory Structure

Currently the only non-standard directories that will be expected by something are

• ~/Pictures/backgrounds/ (by feh for backgrounds)
• ~/Pictures/screenshots/ (by scrot for screenshots)

Colors and Appearance

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. Since I use gnome-terminal, one can use dracula/gnome-terminal.

See this useful color configurator for i3.

Backgrounds

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!).

Fonts

I mostly use Monospace Regular, mostly because it has really good unicode.

Future Plans

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.

Manjaro i3 Dotfiles

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 .

Julia

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.

How-To

Here is a list of useful things that I often forget how to do:

• ldconfig -p: Lists all libraries in library paths. For example do ldconfig -p | grep libsdl to 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 do ldd but this may result in code execution.
• 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 with umount first.)