supki / dotfiles

Nix shenanigans

???

This is how I cope with the impeding doom of having to learn the home-manager tool. I hope I will never have to do that, but deep down I know it's going to happen.

Some small kludges I had to insert to make this actually work

Beating up Zsh to conform to XDG crap.

Unfortunately, due to The Boostrap Problem™ I had to add the following:

export ZDOTDIR=$HOME/.config/zsh

to /etc/zshenv. Otherwise, zsh will try to read its configuration from $HOME directly and I will have to mess around with symlinking to $HOME/.config/zsh myself.

Setting up default shell

Some nix-free interaction with Ubuntu was obviously required to change the default shell:

$ sudo chsh -s /home/m/.nix-profile/bin/zsh m

Unsurprisingly, Ubuntu is still shit in 2022, so that broke the login screen and my user is nowhere to be found there now. How they are able to produce such a awful user experience after 10+ years of trying to make something usable is still a question I have no answer for.

After some additional research, the culprit was identified. I also had to add /home/m/.nix-profile/bin/zsh to the valid login shells listed in /etc/shells. This file is consulted when Ubuntu tries to determine whether a user is a "normal" one.

Launching alacritty

Since it's imperative that terminal emulators should use GPU in 2022, I had to create a x-terminal-emulator wrapper for Ubuntu to pick up the alacritty executable. This wrapper can be found in this repository as kludges/alacritty.wrapper. (Hopefully, no one will name their tool kludges in the future.)
It's in Perl because the original gnome-terminal.wrapper that I butchered was written in Perl. I don't particularly like the language.

For Ubuntu to actually pick up the new wrapper, I had to run

% sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/x-terminal-emulator x-terminal-emulator /usr/bin/alacritty.wrapper

Custom fonts

This one is pretty easy: just need to add <dir>/home/m/.nix-profile/share/fonts</dir> after <!-- Font directory list --> in /etc/fonts/fonts.conf and then run % fc-cache -fv. Probably makes more sense to muck around with ~/.local/fonts or whatever than polluting system-wide configuration, but I just didn't feel like it.

.ghci

It's still unaware of the XDG crap (at least at the GHC version I'm using), so I had to symlink ~/.config/ghc/ghci.conf to ~/.ghci.

pwfeedback

To see the feedback when typing sudo passwords, just add

Defaults pwfeedback

to /etc/sudoers. Hopefully, there's no more exploits.

Solid background

To save my eyes from the default Ubuntu background:

% gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-options 'none'
% gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background primary-color '#222222'

Separate keyboard layouts for each window

For some reason this is not the default:

% gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.input-sources per-window true

Remove ads from my terminal

% sudo pro config set apt_news=false

Integrate applications installed via Nix into the Ubuntu environment

To add the applications to the dock:

# there's probably some shit already put in by Ubuntu
% rm ~/.local/share/{applications,icons}
# this let's Ubuntu see Nix's *.desktop files
% ln -s ~/.nix-profile/share/applications ~/.local/share/applications
# pick up the icons as well
% ln -s ~/.nix-profile/share/icons ~/.local/share/icons