dotfriedrice

> It's a lot more than any shell script I've written, certainly. If you've written a more complex one I'd love to see it. I've been maintaining https://github.com/nickjj/dotfriedrice for around 8 years, it's my dotfiles that have an installer, theming and other things. I'd still absolutely classify this is a shell script / dotfiles project. I've added just enough customization to make it easy to modify most things without needing to fork the repo. I only added a GUI last year after my hardware was finally compatible with native Linux, otherwise I would have switched almost 10 years ago. Before that, it focused on command line tools and your terminal, that's because I ran it under Windows with WSL 2 but it also worked fine on native Linux even back then, macOS too because I use it on a company issued laptop. All that to say, I don't see th

> With Ghostty my only option is to maintain different config files per machine. This turns out to be a benefit IMO. Ghostty supports include files. You can have all of your shared config in 1 main config and then have small files that are included which are machine specific. My dotfiles uses it and it supports Linux and macOS. Example: https://github.com/nickjj/dotfriedrice/blob/master/.config/g... You can have something like this in your Ghostty config: config-file = ?config.local And then on each machine that's different, you can have your machine specific config in ~/.config/ghostty/config.local or whatever you decide to name the file. It works out nicely because config options are merged, so the local file can overwrite what's in the main config. This lets you deviate from the original git committed config without needing to modify i

It's neat that Hyprland lets you define layouts in its config but I like niri's approach. It uses KDL (an established document / config language) and slightly extends it to add useful things like being able to include files. For example, here's mine: https://github.com/nickjj/dotfriedrice/blob/master/.config/n... What you end up with is a config file that's natural to read with no prior knowledge about anything and if you want to look something specific up, you know it's officially documented and not some home grown pattern someone created. There's a certain amount of comfort and stability you get with a "what you see is what you get" approach. I never felt like I needed variables, conditions, functions or loops with niri's config.

I like how efficient Arch is, in the sense that you have nothing and now you get to pick and choose what you want. My main desktop I use for full time software development and video editing is from 2014. I've run Windows on it forever. I put Arch on it ~8 months ago. A full desktop environment I put together based on niri boots at 1.1 GB of memory. Every app I want is installed (tons of CLI tools, various GUI tools, Docker, video editors, browser, etc.) all together comes in at 10 GB of disk total for everything based on what `df -h` says for my root partition. My machine does have 16 GB of memory so I'm not pressed for memory, but it's nice to know the machine runs on a system designed to not be bloated. After switching from Windows 10 Pro, it felt like I got a hardware upgrade. Things open faster and generally speaking everything just f

If anyone is looking for a niri based opinionated set of configuration on top of CachyOS (or vanilla Arch) I put together: https://github.com/nickjj/dotfriedrice The goal is after installing the official ISO, you can get a developer focused desktop environment up and running in ~10 minutes with 1 command. It's quite configurable so you can change around anything you want ahead of time or after you install it. I use it with vanilla Arch but I know of quite a few people using it successfully with CachyOS. For CachyOS, the only manual adjustment you have to make before running the repo's install script is uninstalling `jack` since it conflicts with `pipewire-jack`. I could easily roll this into the script but so far no one has complained loud enough to automate this. I also wonder if CachyOS will eventually drop that AUR dependency in its of

I run vanilla Arch with niri (Wayland), Waybar and a few other tools to create a desktop environment. I didn't do any special kernel or app specific tweaks for performance. The machine boots using 1.1 GB of memory and total disk space after installing a bunch of apps is ~10 GB. Browser, Docker, video editor, image editor, LibreOffice, OBS, VMs, a ton of CLI tools and everything you'd expect to have a fully working and usable system is there. It's a wonderful environment on 2014 era hardware. Granted I have 16 GB of memory but it would be fine with 8 GB even when running non-trivial Docker based projects and doing 1080p video editing. Even Silksong runs at 60 FPS with a GeForce 750 Ti (2 GB) GPU. Although I splurged on a used AMD RX 480 (8 GB) to get more things to run nicely in parallel. Wayland is very picky with limited GPU VRAM, especi

> don't really recommend it to others, since there's all these great tools that have the features you need I thought about using any one of those tools but happily chose shell scripts and symlinks instead. It hasn't let me down in almost a decade with https://github.com/nickjj/dotfriedrice and would highly recommend this approach. It's basically a 2,500 line shell script to fully automate setting up a system from scratch in a general purpose / opinionated but customizable way that works on Arch Linux, Debian, Ubuntu, macOS and supports WSL 2 in Windows. I have it running on multiple systems, no need to even fork it since it uses patterns suitable for making changes in git ignored files and also has a config file for certain things. When it comes to setting up a complete desktop environment or even just terminal based tools, dotfiles IMO a

I've had public dotfiles at https://github.com/nickjj/dotfriedrice for a long time but recently branded them and after having run native Linux for 6 months, I added a desktop environment based on using niri and Arch Linux. It can get you up and running in a few minutes with an installer that can set up a new system or keep an existing system up to date. There's also a command line version that works on Arch and Debian based distros (including WSL 2) and macOS. I use it on my personal devices and a company issued MBP. I'm not going to lie, I've been using computers for 25 years and this is the happiest I've ever been with using 1 machine for everything (software development, media creation, gaming, etc.).

I do like CLI tools and TUIs but in the article it mentions Gnome style apps don't fit the look. That sounds like a limitation of Omarchy. It's not too bad to theme GTK apps and have them all look a consistent way. For example I use Tokyonight Moon and Gruvbox and they both have GTK themes that look great for Firefox, Thunar, GIMP, LibreOffice and more. I don't use Omarchy but here's a few screenshots https://x.com/nickjanetakis/status/2037125261657883061/photo.... Nothing fancy was done on my end, just installed the specific GTK themes. They even support live reloading because GTK's tooling supports it, my dotfiles at https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles handle all of it for you. I still prefer TUIs but you can have nice looking GUI apps for when you want them.

=== SCRATCHPADS === I've avoided needing them because of 2 niri features: - You can quickly tap alt+tab to focus the last previously focused window (assignable to a custom bind if you want) - niri's CLI is very easy to work with so you can build a general purpose "launch or focus" shell script in a few lines of code If you have something like Discord or any app you want to only be opened once, you can "launch or focus" it and now it's running somewhere. Somewhere as in, you can control which workspace it's on at your discretion. Then if you launch it again from anywhere, you'll jump right to it instead of launching a 2nd instance and you can tap alt+tab to go back to exactly where you were before. A nice effect is after it's been launched once it never interferes with your existing windows since nothing is getting opened again. I'm after

Niri is so good. I've switched to using it about 5 months ago and it was legit the best computing decision I can remember making in recent history to move away from Windows. I have a huge amount of gratitude towards the author of niri. My dotfiles have always included an install script for setting everything up around command line tools, theme switching and more but it fully supports niri now too on Arch based distros https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles in case anyone is shopping around for a new desktop environment and wants to get going quickly. I run it on both my main desktop and a travel laptop.

It is nice to have this confidence. I ran Arch Linux for almost a year in WSL 2, it was really good. Then I ran Arch natively for ~5 months, it's really good. Now I still run Arch natively, but I also use the Arch Docker image to test my dotfiles[0] with a fresh file system. Also, for when I want to run end to end tests for my dotfiles that set up a complete desktop environment I run Arch in a VM. I have 99 problems but running Arch isn't one of them. [0]: https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles

One nice thing about tmux is it also supports include files in its config. This lets you put your theme colors in a different file, such as `source-file "~/.config/tmux/theme.conf"` and then your theme switching external script or tool can symlink a specific theme's tmux file to that path. That's what I do in my dotfiles: # Main tmux config https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles/blob/master/.config/tmux/tmux.conf # One of the theme files https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles/blob/master/themes/tokyonight-moon/tmux.conf It allows for hot-reloading different themes as well.

This is what I use too, the nice thing about this is you can use your existing tools natively and you have lots of flexibility in how you want them arranged. Could be split panes in 1 window or different windows in their own session. For example I have a `monitor` script in my dotfiles at https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles/blob/master/.local/bin/mo... which for now just splits btop and a dedicated GPU monitoring tool. If I'm already in tmux and run that script it splits a few tools in a new tmux window but if I'm not in tmux already then it creates a new "monitor" session with the same splits. I also have it assigned to my status bar where if I click Waybar's CPU icon, it "launches or focuses" that monitor script in a new terminal so it doesn't spawn duplicates if I click the CPU multiple times. Basically ultimate freedom in how I want to