Phundrak’s dotfiles

• Presentation
• Screenshots
• Features
  • Xresources
• Dependencies
• Installation
  • Install Arch Linux
    • Get the latest live system with fast mirrors
    • Install the system
  • Install basic packages
  • Execute bootstrap
    • Get a correct keyboard layout
    • Set our locale
    • Create some folders
    • Set user’s shell to fish
    • Install yay if it isn’t already installed
    • Setting up Emacs: Installing Spacemacs
    • Set up dotfiles
      • Update our dotfiles’ remotes
      • Get envtpl
      • Update our submodules
      • Generate our alt files
      • Symlink some system config files
    • Install basic packages
    • Installing Tryone’s Compton fork
    • Enable some of our services
      • Docker
      • Emacs
      • SSH server
      • Ly
    • Set up our fish shell
      • Install fisher
      • Install our extensions
    • Install packages from git
      • i3-gaps rounded
      • Polybar Battery
      • Reveal.JS
    • Install Rust
      • Install the toolchains
      • Install some utilities
    • Clean the pacman and yay cache
• Licence

Presentation

This is my collection of dotfiles for my daily GNU/Linux environment, tweaked to my liking. If you wish to get the same setup as mine, follow the instructions below.

As you can see, I personally use fish as my shell of choice, and Emacs using Spacemacs (still with Emacs keybinding) as my main text editor.

I also use Resloved’s fork of i3-gaps with two polybar bars and Tryone144’s fork of Compton. The colors scheme for rofi, Emacs and polybar are chosen from the wallpapers using pywal.

Screenshots

Desktop with Neofetch in the terminal

Desktop with Emacs opened

Desktop with Rofi

Features

• Emacs configuration perfectly tailored for my own use
• Beautiful and comfy i3 and polybar configuration
• And enough information below to get basically the same distro install as I have on my main computer and my travel laptop.

Most of the org files you will find in this repos are the actual source code of much of my config files. For instance, the Execute bootstrap subpart of this file exports almost all of its code snippets to .yadm/bootstrap thanks to M-x org-babel-tangle from within Emacs. Below I will also present and comment some of my short config files which do not deserve to have a full org file dedicated to them.

Xresources

My Xresources file is very short. Indeed, it only contains two lines which are dedicated to my st terminal to set its font and shell. The font is set as follows.

  st.font: Source Code Pro for Powerline:style=book

And I will set my shell like this:

  st.shell: /usr/bin/fish

I used to have lines dedicated to UXTerm and URxvt, but I cast them out of my system.

Dependencies

Of course, some dependencies are needed for my dotfiles to work well. Here is a non-exhaustive list of software needed by these configuration files:

• GNU/Emacs >= 26.2

  • Spacemacs (develop branch)
  • My conlanging layer
  • Venmos’ w3m layer
• The Fish shell, using fisher
• Luke Smith’s fork of st
• Resloved’s i3-gaps-rounded fork of Airblader’s i3-gaps, itself a fork of i3
• Compton, more specificaly Tryone’s fork
• pywal
• dmenu
• j4-dmenu-desktop
• Rofi
• minted
• Rust (stable and nightly)
• LaTeX and XeTeX (texlive packages on Arch Linux)
• tmux, based on this repo’s configuration by Grégory Pakosz.
• And a bunch of other stuff, see below

And some other stuff scattered around in my dotfiles.

BTW, I use Arch.

Installation

Here will be presented what I do to get my system up and running on a fresh Arch Linux install. These installation instructions were written in order to get an Arch Linux distribution up and running with the same configuration as my main computer’s and my travelling laptop’s configuration.

Install Arch Linux

I usually install Arch from the vanilla ISO, however I began using archfi to install easily the distro (I’ve done it so many times, I know how it works now). Usually, my distros will be installed on at least two partitions, one dedicated to /home, the other to the root partition /.

If the computer supports EFI bootloaders, the EFI partition will be mounted on /boot. I generally use rEFInd as my boot manager, but if you are more comfortable with another one, just install what you want. Be aware that if you format your /boot partition, you will delete all boot managers that already exist; so, if you are dual-booting, DO NOT FORMAT IT. Yes, I made the mistake of wiping the Windows boot manager.

The swap partition is always at least 4GB large, and I should have a total of 12GB of combined RAM and swap. This means on my main computer I have 16GB of RAM and 4GB of swap, but on my thinkpad I have 4GB of RAM and 8GB of swap.

Get the latest live system with fast mirrors

When you boot into the live ISO, execute the following command:

  pacman -Sy reflector
  reflector --country France --country Germany --latest 200 \
            --protocol http --protocol https --sort rate \
            --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

This will update the packages from your live ISO, and you will get the best mirrors for your installation. Of course, change the countries accordingly to your location.

Install the system

Then you can use a custom script to ease your installation of Arch if you do not wish to do it manually. Personally, I’ve done it several times already, I know how the distro works, I just want to be able to install my distro quickly now.

  wget archfi.sf.net/archfi
  # Or from matmoul.github.io/archfi if SourceForge is down
  sh archfi

Then, follow the instructions and install Arch Linux. Take the opportunity to install as many packages as you need, mainly yay which I use as my package manager (it is just a wrapper for pacman) and AUR helper, and pacman-contrib which will help us installing some packages later.

Once your system is installed, reboot and remove your installation media from your computer.

Install basic packages

We will need some basic packages in order to run the bootstrap file. So, let’s install fish (our shell running the script) and git.

  sudo pacman -Sy fish git yadm

Execute bootstrap

yadm comes with a very handy feature: its bootstrap script. We can execute it by running the following command:

  yadm bootstrap

Notice these two header files, we can see this is a fish script, hence why we need fish (which is my daily shell anyway).

  #!/usr/bin/fish
  # -*- mode: fish -*-

Let’s take a look at what it does.

Get a correct keyboard layout

I use mainly the bépo layout, a French keyboard layout inspired by Dvorak layouts, however I sometimes need to switch back to the standard French AZERTY or the American QWERTY layout, so I make it so the Menu key switches for me my layout between these three. This makes it so my xorg configuration of my keyboard looks like this:

  set keyboardconf \
  'Section "InputClass"
          Identifier "system-keyboard"
          MatchIsKeyboard "on"
          Option "XkbLayout" "fr,fr,us"
          Option "XkbModel" "pc104"
          Option "XkbVariant" "bepo,,"
          Option "XkbOptions" "grp:menu_toggle"
  EndSection'

So, let’s set it as our keyboard configuration.

  printf "\n# Set keyboard layout #########################################################\n\n"
  echo $keyboardconf | sudo tee /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/00-keyboard.conf

Set our locale

I use two main locales, the French and US UTF-8 locales, and I like to keep the Japanese locale activated just in case.

  set mylocales "en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8" "fr_FR.UTF-8 UTF-8" "ja_JP.UTF-8 UTF-8"

Let’s enable these.

  printf "\n# Set our locale ##############################################################\n\n"
  for item in $mylocales
      if test (grep -e "#$item" /etc/locale.gen)
          sudo sed -i "/$item/s/^#//g" /etc/locale.gen
      end
  end

This is my configuration I usually use when it comes to my locale.

  set localeconf "LANG=en_US.UTF-8
  LC_COLLATE=C
  LC_NAME=fr_FR.UTF-8
  LC_NUMERIC=fr_FR.UTF-8
  LC_IDENTIFICATION=fr_FR.UTF-8
  LC_TELEPHONE=fr_FR.UTF-8
  LC_MONETARY=fr_FR.UTF-8
  LC_PAPER=fr_FR.UTF-8
  LC_ADDRESS=fr_FR.UTF-8
  LC_TIME=fr_FR.UTF-8
  LC_MEASUREMENT=fr_FR.UTF-8"

Let’s set it as our system’s locale.

  echo $localeconf | sudo tee /etc/locale.conf

Now we can generate our locale!

  printf "\n# Generate locale #############################################################\n\n"
  sudo locale-gen

Create some folders

Let’s create some folders we might need for mounting our drives, Android devices and CDs.

  printf "\n# Create directories for mounting #############################################\n\n"
  sudo mkdir -p /mnt/{USB,CD,Android}
  sudo chown $USER:(id -g $USER) /mnt/{USB,CD,Android}

We also need the following folder for our nano backups.

  mkdir -p $HOME/.cache/nano/backups

Set user’s shell to fish

First of all, the bootstrap shell will set the user’s shell to fish.

  printf "\n# Set fish as the default shell ###############################################\n\n"
  chsh -s /usr/bin/fish

Install yay if it isn’t already installed

Now we’ll need to be sure yay, our AUR helper, is installed on our system. If it is, we don’t need to to anything. However, if it isn’t, we’ll install it manually.

  if ! test which yay
      printf "\n# Installing yay ##############################################################\n\n"
      cd
      mkdir -p fromGIT
      cd fromGIT
      git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay.git
      cd yay
      makepkg -si --noconfirm
  else
      printf "\n# yay already installed #######################################################\n\n"
  end

Setting up Emacs: Installing Spacemacs

Now, the first thing we want to do with Emacs is install its Spacemacs distribution. We’ll clone its develop branch into ~/.emacs.d. We need to do this prior to our dotfiles’ cloning because of some submodules that are cloned within our ~/.emacs.d directory, and git won’t let us clone Spacemacs in an already existing and non-empty directory. To make sure it isn’t one, let’s delete any potentially existing ~/.emacs.d directory:

  printf "\n# Installing Spacemacs ########################################################\n\n"
  rm -rf ~/.emacs.d

Now we can clone Spacemacs:

  git clone --single-branch --branch develop https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs ~/.emacs.d

And we can restore what might have been deleted in our ~/.emacs.d/private directory:

  yadm checkout -- ~/.emacs.d/private/

Set up dotfiles

Update our dotfiles’ remotes

This line in the bootstrap script will test if the current user is using my username. If yes, it’s probably me.

  if ! test (echo "phundrak" | sed -e "s/^.*$USER//I")

If it is me installing and using these dotfiles, I want the remotes of my dotfiles to be set to ssh remotes using my ssh keys.

  printf "\n# Update yadm’s remotes #######################################################\n\n"
  yadm remote set-url origin git@labs.phundrak.fr:phundrak/dotfiles.git
  yadm remote add github git@github.com:phundrak/dotfiles.git

I will also want to decrypt my encrypted files, such as said ssh keys.

  printf "\n# Decrypt encrypted dotfiles ##################################################\n\n"
  yadm decrypt

Finally, let’s close this if statement.

  end

Get envtpl

Before we set our dotfiles up, let’s make sure envtpl is correctly installed. This package will be needed for generating our alt dotfiles.

  printf '\n# Install envtpl ##############################################################\n\n'
  yay -Syu python-envtpl-git

Update our submodules

Now we can download the various dependencies of our dotfiles. To do so, let’s run the following command:

  printf "\n# Getting yadm susbmodules ####################################################\n\n"
  yadm submodule update --init --recursive

Generate our alt files

Now this should be the last manipulation on our dotfiles: let’s create our alternate files:

  printf "\n# Generating alt files ########################################################\n\n"
  yadm alt

Symlink some system config files

We have some files in etc/ that are to be symlinked to /etc.

  for f in (find ~/.etc -type f)
      set dest (echo $f | sed -n 's/^.*etc\(.*\)$/\/etc\1/p')
      sudo ln -s $f $dest
  end

We may also want to symlink our nanorc to the /root directory for when we use nano as sudo.

  read --prompt "echo 'Symlink .nanorc to root’s .nanorc? (Y/n): ' " -l nanoroot
  if test $nanoroot = 'y' || test $nanoroot = "Y" || test $nanoroot = ''
      printf "\n# Symlinking .nanorc to root’s .nanorc ########################################\n\n"
      sudo ln -s $HOME/.nanorc /root/.nanorc
  end

Install basic packages

Let’s set in a custom varible what packages we’ll be needing.

  set PACKAGES \
  asar ascii aspell-en aspell-fr assimp awesome-terminal-fonts base-devel bat \
  biber bleachbit bluez-firmware bluez-utils bookworm boost bzip2 chromium clisp \
  clight compton cppcheck cppreference cppreference-devhelp cpupower cronie \
  cryptsetup device-mapper diffutils discord-canary discount ditaa dmenu \
  dmenu-lpass docker docker-compose doxygen dunst dwarffortress emacs \
  exfat-utils ffmpegthumbnailer findutils firefox flake8 font-mathematica \
  fontforge freeglut fzf gcc-libs gdb gimp glibc gnome-disk-utility \
  gnome-epub-thumbnailer gnu-free-fonts gnuplot go-tools graphviz htop i3-gaps \
  i3lock-blur i3status igdm-bin inetutils j4-dmenu-desktop jfsutils jmtpfs \
  lastpass-cli less linux-headers lldb logrotate lvm2 ly-git meson minted mpc \
  mpd mpd-rich-presence-discord-git mpv mupdf-tools nano ncdu ncmpcpp \
  nemo-fileroller nemo-preview neofetch netctl networkmanager \
  networkmanager-openvpn nm-connection-editor nnn nomacs noto-fonts-emoji npm \
  ntfs-3g numlockx openssh p7zip pacman-contrib pandoc-bin pavucontrol pciutils \
  pcurses pdfpc polybar pulseaudio-bluetooth python-envtpl-git python-pip \
  python-pywal qemu r raw-thumbnailer reflector rofi rofi-wifi-menu-git rsync \
  rtv rustup s-nail samba scrot sent shadow siji-git simplescreenrecorder \
  speedcrunch sshfs st-luke-git swi-prolog texlive-bibtexextra texlive-bin \
  texlive-core texlive-fontsextra texlive-formatsextra texlive-games \
  texlive-humanities texlive-langchinese texlive-langcyrillic texlive-langextra \
  texlive-langgreek texlive-langjapanese texlive-langkorean texlive-latexextra \
  texlive-localmanager-git texlive-music texlive-pictures texlive-pstricks \
  texlive-publishers texlive-science tmux tree ttf-arphic-uming ttf-baekmuk \
  ttf-bitstream-vera ttf-dejavu ttf-google-fonts-opinionated-git ttf-joypixels \
  ttf-liberation ttf-material-design-icons-git ttf-ms-fonts ttf-symbola \
  ttf-tibetan-machine ttf-twemoji-color ttf-unifont unicode unicode-emoji unrar \
  usbutils valgrind vim w3m wget x11-ssh-askpass xclip xdg-user-dirs-gtk \
  xorg-drivers xorg-apps xfsprogs xorg-server xorg-xinit xss-lock yapf

These are the minimum I would have in my own installation. You can edit it however you want. Let’s install those.

  printf "\n# Installing needed packages ##################################################\n\n"
  yay -S --needed $PACKAGES

Installing Tryone’s Compton fork

For some reason, I found installing directly this fork does not work, and I need to install it after I installed the regular compton packages. compton-tryone-git will replace compton which will be removed.

  printf "\n# Installing tryone’s compton fork ############################################\n\n"
  yay -S compton-tryone-git

Enable some of our services

We have installed some packages which require some services to run. Let’s enable them.

Docker

First, let’s activate Docker.

  printf "\n# Enabling and starting Docker ################################################\n\n"
  sudo systemctl enable --now docker

Now, if we wish it, we can be added to the docker group so we won’t have to type sudo each time we call Docker or Docker Compose.

  read --prompt "echo 'Do you wish to be added to the `docker` group? (Y/n): ' " -l adddockergroup
  if test $adddockergroup = 'y' || test $adddockergroup = "Y" || test $adddockergroup = ''
      sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
  end

Emacs

Emacs will run as a user service, which means it won’t be launched until we log in.

  printf "\n# Enabling Emacs as user service ##############################################\n\n"
  systemctl --user enable --now emacs

SSH server

Maybe we want to activate an SSH server on our machine. If so, we can enable it. Let’s ask the question.

  read --prompt "echo 'Do you want to activate the ssh server? (Y/n): ' " -l sshdserver
  if test $sshdserver = 'y' || test $sshdserver = "Y" || test $sshdserver = ''
      printf "\n# Enabling ssh server #########################################################\n\n"
      sudo systemctl enable --now sshd
  end

Ly

Ly is a display manager based on ncurses which I find nice enough for me to use (I generally don’t like using display managers). Let’s enable it, and let’s disable tty2 while we’re at it (Ly uses it to run X).

  sudo systemctl enable --now ly
  sudo systemctl disable getty@tty2

Set up our fish shell

Install fisher

We will be using fisher as our extensions manager for Fish. Let’s install it.

  printf "\n# Installing fisher ###########################################################\n\n"
  curl https://git.io/fisher --create-dirs -sLo ~/.config/fish/functions/fisher.fish

Install our extensions

I generally use the following extensions in my Fish shell.

  set FISHEXTENSIONS \
  edc/bass franciscolourenco/done jethrokuan/fzf jethrokuan/z \
  jorgebucaran/fish-getopts laughedelic/pisces matchai/spacefish \
  tuvistavie/fish-ssh-agent

Let’s install these:

  fisher add $FISHEXTENSIONS

Install packages from git

Now, let’s install some packages from git directly.

i3-gaps rounded

I know we already installed i3-gaps from the AUR, why reinstall it? Well, that is certainly bad practices, but this allowed me to already have the needed dependencies for building i3 installed. Now, let’s clone it, build it, and install it. Doing this is probably very bad practices though, be warned.

  printf "\n# Install i3-gaps-rounded #####################################################\n\n"
  cd ~/fromGIT
  git clone https://github.com/resloved/i3.git i3-gaps-rounded
  cd i3-gaps-rounded
  rm -rf build
  autoreconf --force --install
  mkdir build && cd build
  ../configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --disable-sanitizers
  make -j
  sudo make install

Polybar Battery

Now let’s install polybar-battery. This is a binary that I’ll use in my i3 config to indicate my battery level. It also sends a notification on low battery and on charging completed.

  printf "\n# Install polybar-battery #####################################################\n\n"
  cd ~/fromGIT
  git clone https://github.com/drdeimos/polybar_another_battery.git
  cd polybar_another_battery
  go get -u github.com/distatus/battery/cmd/battery
  make build

Now, we have our binary, let’s symlink it in our local binary directory, ~/.local/bin.

  ln -s polybar-ab ~/.local/bin/polybar-ab

Reveal.JS

I sometimes use Reveal.JS to make presentations, and I set its location in my dotspacemacs file to be in ~/fromGIT, so let’s clone it there.

  printf "\n# Install Reveal.JS ###########################################################\n\n"
  cd ~/fromGIT
  git clone https://github.com/hakimel/reveal.js.git

Install Rust

Install the toolchains

When using rust, I bounce between two toolchains, the stable toolchain and the nightly toolchain. To install them, I will use rustup which has already been installed.

  printf "\n# Install the rust toolchains, nightly is the default one #####################\n\n"
  rustup default nightly

This will both download the nightly toolchain and set it as the default one. Yup, I like to live dangerously. Now to install the stable toolchain, let’s run this:

  rustup toolchain install stable

Install some utilities

We’ll need some utilities when developing Rust from Emacs, namely rustfmt and racer. Let’s install them with cargo.

  printf "\n# Add rust utilities ##########################################################\n\n"
  cargo install rustfmt racer

Clean the pacman and yay cache

Finally, we are almost done! Let’s clean the cache of pacman and yay.

  printf "\n# Clean the pacman and yay cache ##############################################\n\n"
  yay -Sc --noconfirm

You should now run a system pretty close to the one I have on my main computer and my thinkpad.

Licence

All of my dotfiles (and my dotfiles only) are available under the GNU GPLv3 Licence. Please consult /phundrak/config.phundrak.com/src/commit/37830b579abf82ac1668b27a48ff10ee93170ae7/LICENCE.md for more information. In short: you are free to access, edit and redistribute all of my dotfiles under the same licence and as allowed by the licence, and if you fuck up something, it’s your own responsibility.