Makehome

This is a collection of personal configuration files (so-called “dotfiles”).

I’m primarily an Emacs user, so perhaps I spend a bit less time configuring things like my $SHELL than the average GNU/Linux user. That being said, I do spend quite a bit of time in terminals, so I need a smooth experience at least.

Don’t expect to find my Emacs configuration here. I keep that in a separate repository.

After many years of using Zsh, I switched to Bash as my primary shell interpreter. This has nothing to do with Zsh not being good. I just felt like spending some time in Bash-land. And no, I’m not considering trying Fish. I took one glance at the featurelist on the Fish homepage and quickly realized that this is not a shell for me.

One of the most important things for me with a shell configuration is a prompt that does not eat up the whole screen. Excessive verbosity makes me seasick. I think a good compromise between frugality and pomp is a one character prompt, namely $ (I use % as my Zsh prompt). This in a very obvious way indicates that the shell is waiting for me to give it instructions to work with, without overwhelming me with information that I don’t need (information that commands like pwd and whoami can give me, should I suffer a cerebreal meltdown).

I’m not known to change window managers frequently. I’ve tried quite a few over the years, but there are only four that I’ve managed to stick with for longer periods of time: WindowMaker, Enlightenment (0.16), FVWM (my absolute favorite) and Openbox. However, recently I did decide to give EXWM a try. It seemed to make sense that somebody who spends 24/7 in Emacs would also let it manage windows. Great idea, but reality was perhaps not quite so great. Maybe if I had been a bit more patient, but that is one virtue a don’t have.

But I really wanted to spend a little time with a tiling window manager. I’m sick of having to constantly shuffle windows across the screen. There is a lot to choose from: i3, BSPWM, XMonad, Luftshe… whatever, etc. My needs are quite simple: don’t get in my way, don’t show any panels whatsover (I want the full screen for windows) and allow me to set up keybindings my way.

In the end I decided to give Sway a go. It is a Wayland compositor and very similar to i3. I’m quite happy with it. The default configuration does include one very annoying top panel that sticks out like a sore thumb, chomping away at my screen real estate, but fortunately it is easy to get rid of.

I’m yet to clean up and import my Sway configuration. I still have my old Openbox configs here, in case anybody would be interested.

I also still have some Vim configuration here. I don’t really use Vim at all anymore, but I used it for a long time, before I figured out why Emacs is better in just about every way. I’ll still keep my old configs here for the time being, just in case.

I keep a ~/bin with some scripts that, in one way or the other reduce my workload. Most of them are a mess and need to be cleaned up. The same goes for everything else.

Tasks

• General [0/1]
  • [ ] clean up
• Bash [1/3]
  • [X] automatically activate/deactivate python virtual environments
  • [ ] show fortune in interactive shells
  • [ ] aliases for pacman commands
• Sway [0/2]
  • [ ] add sway configuration
  • [ ] script+keybinding to position Anki and PCManFM for adding cards

Updates

<2020-09-04 Fri> Aliases, Documentation

I added a few more aliases to my Bash configuration. I also updated the documentation a bit.

<2020-09-03 Thu> Activate/Deactivate Python Virtual Environments

I implemented a function (similar to what I had for Zsh) that automatically activates/deactivates Python virtual environments as I enter a directory.

Working on this, I realized how comfortable of a shell Zsh is. I was also reminded that there is always a way to make it work, if you really want to.

<2020-08-28 ven> Bash Configuration

I changed my default shell to bash, since it seems to work best with Emacs. I also cleaned up a little and changed the README to be Org mode formatted.