Posts tagged: linux Archive

stow local ignore

2026-04-18T10:36:00Z

Stow comes with a local and global ignore list that you can use to ignore certain files or directories.

If you put Perl regular expressions, one per line, in a .stow-local-ignore file within any top level package directory, in which case any file or directory within that package matching any of these regular expressions will be ignored. In the absence of this package-specific ignore list, Stow will instead use the contents of ~/.stow-global-ignore, if it exists. If neither the package-local or global ignore list exist, Stow will use its own built-in default ignore list, which serves as a useful example of the format of these ignore list files:

Example given from the docs

RCS
.+,v

CVS
\.\#.+       # CVS conflict files / emacs lock files
\.cvsignore

\.svn
_darcs
\.hg

\.git
\.gitignore
\.gitmodules

.+~          # emacs backup files
\#.*\#       # emacs autosave files

^/README.*
^/LICENSE.*
^/COPYING

Reference #

https://www.gnu.org/software/stow/manual/html_node/Types-And-Syntax-Of-Ignore-Lists.html

💭 No one under 18 installs Linux

2026-03-09T11:46:15Z

😂 Should I be concerned that My 12yo installed Arch BTW on his own?

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 POV: You install Clawdbot on VPS - YouTube

2026-02-16T10:22:40Z

Use a linux vps, It’s easy, just follow these simple instructions.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

setup bambu-studio in distrobox

2025-12-06T21:17:39Z

gpus are awesome and I need one for Bambu Studio to be usable in a distrobox. Adding the --nvidia flag to distrobox create bind mounts the nvidia /dev/ devices and sets up the necessary environment variables. Once we are in there are a couple of packages to install to make it work.

distrobox create --name bambu-studio --image archlinux:latest --nvidia
distrobox enter bambu-studio
sudo pacman -S nvidia-utils lib32-nvidia-utils vulkan-icd-loader
nvidia-smi
glxinfo | gprep OpenGL
sudo pacman -Syu --needed base-devel git
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/paru-bin.git
cd paru-bin
makepkg -si
paru -S bambustudio-bin

bambu-studio

distrobox-export --app bambu-studio

💭 Microsoft keeps losing - YouTube

2025-11-15T17:51:23Z

👏👏👏preach it prime! M$ continues to prove that they are not making products for you something else is affoot and shit you don’t want is shoved down your throat and forced on you.

Prime points out that the agentic is prompt injected itself😂. Rather than making a better os experience it’s assuming you are stupid and need everything done for you. But what I don’t get here in the text scaling example. Why the F does it not just fix it for me. When I ask the machine to make text bigger it puts a flashy circle where to click. This is a one time setup for someone who gives no fucks to remember how to do it. Why is the machine doing this weird hand holding watching us do it’s work rather than just doing it? I like the pattern when you change display setting it gives you a counter that reverts everything if for some reason shit is so bad you can’t even see it. Do that, not this help me click bs.

Now in parallel we have steam making Linux desktop better and better. Allowing you to just access the hardware you own to do what you want to do with it. Providing a fantastic hands off out of the box experience for the price of the hardware. No ongoing fees, no upgrade cycle, soft lock, aribraray cutoff date, tpm bs requirements. Good stuff as it was supposed to be created.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 2025 The Year Of The Linux Desktop - YouTube

2025-10-10T13:14:37Z

The Year of the Linux Desktop is a meme, every year is the year of the Linux desktop as it gains rounding errors of market share. Outside of Linux nerds, developers that use servers on the regular, cheap asses reviving old hardware that is dead in the eyes of other OS’s, the average user wont even notice a difference with the right distro. I ran bazzite with plasma for over a year, It would be super beginner friendly while allowing users customization on levels never seen on non-Linux machines. Other than adobe, roblox, and EA games with easy anti-cheat most users probably aren’t going to run in to any issues. They probably wont even notice at this point, which is where the meme comes in. Why would anyone switch if its not noticeably different for the average user, they wont, until what is working for them stops working for them.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 "Pacman is currently in use, please wait."

2025-09-16T01:26:33Z

"Pacman is currently in use, please wait." / Pacman & Package Upgrade Issues / Arch Linux Forums

bbs.archlinux.org

I ran into this issue today, never have I ever before though. Omarchy looking a bit sus on me. This was even after a fresh boot, no pacman process running. just realized I forgot to check yay which it has installed for me. I had to force it in.

sudo rm /var/lib/pacman/db.lck

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

tar over ssh

2025-09-13T10:50:42Z

Today I learned how to use tar over ssh to save hours in file transfers. I keep all of my projects in ~/git (very creative I know, I’ve done it for years and haven’t changed). I just swapped out my main desktop from bazzite to hyprland, and wanted to get all of my projects back. Before killing my bazzite install I moved everything over (16GB of many small files), it took over 14 hours, maybe longer. I had started in the morning and just let it churn.

This was not going to happen for re-seeding all of my projects on my new system, I knew there had to be a better way, I looked at rsync, but for seeding I ran into this tar over ssh technique and it only took me 6m51s to pull all of my projects off of my remote server.

ssh user@192.168.1.100 'tar -C /tank/git -cpf - .' \
  | tar -C "$HOME/git" -xpf -

bash timestamp

2025-08-22T15:35:36Z

Today I needed to make a backup of some config. I wanted to add a timestamp so that I knew when the backup was made. This would make unique backups easy, and I could tell when they were made.

cp configfile configfile.backup.$(date %s)

If you want to decrypt the timestamp into something more human readable. You can list backup files, strip out the timestamp, and then convert it to a human readable date.

/bin/ls | grep backup | sed 's/configfile.backup.//' | xargs -I {} date -d @{}

or just throw it to the date command by hand.

date -d @1755895402

💭 DHH on X: "Rewiring your muscle memory for copy/paste when you...

2025-08-17T15:39:42Z

External Link

X (formerly Twitter) · x.com

Today I learned that its spelled “Rite of Passage”, and is short for ritual. Mac has so many of these things that are just different, but do not let you reconfigure them and you are stuck with it. copy / paste I don’t get, the 3 times I’ve touched a mac since I was a kid its frustrated me. Is it lock in? or is it them actually thinking this is the right way and you all shall do as we say.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 Omarchy is on the move

2025-08-07T14:28:34Z

Omarchy is on the move

Omarchy has been improving at a furious pace. Since it was first released on June 26, I've pushed out 18(!) new releases together with a rapidly growing community of collaborators, users, and new-t...

world.hey.com

It’s facinating how many people are making the jump from mac/windows, not just to linux, not just to archlinux, but to a full on tiling window manager. DHH has omakub and omarchy. Omakub is advertised as easy and for beginners, but many are skipping right over that to go straight for the hard stuff.

DHH mentions hyprland here, one thing I think he is missing is that this is the first real mainstream tiling window manager that is a competitor to i3, awesomewm, qtile that runs Wayland. I think they were able to pull a bunch of great benefits such as lack of screen tearing and animations from this.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

Dolphin Remote Storage Previews

2025-08-02T14:58:09Z

I’ve got a few samba shares going in my homelab, and I’m struggling finding a great app to scroll through vacation photos with my wife. I want something intuitive, non intimidating, and just works. Turns out that the default file browser application for hyprland works great, but you need to enable previews for remote storage for it to work for my use case here.

💭 An Ode To My 10-Year-Old Thinkpad T440

2025-07-25T01:33:47Z

An Ode To My 10-Year-Old Thinkpad T440

mbrizic.com

I like reading about old hardware and how to keep it running, sending shit out to e-waste after barely using it for a year makes my skin crawl. I find it interesting how most of these resurrections start with a linux build, and the author giving in and going for linux for the first time and enjoying being able to use something they thought was useless for real work.

That being said I have weird thoughts similar to this guy about being able to take a machine and write a novel somewhere off in the distance, but any time I try to do real work form any laptop these days the ergonomics become so unappealing that I tend to just not do anything away from my desk. Theres something that sounds so great about opening vim on old hardware that could last for hours, sip on coffee and write away, but it never works out like that in practice.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 2025-07-10 Notes

2025-07-18T15:26:28Z

2025-07-09 Notes from yesterday I have temporal stuff kind of going with postiz in a windsurf session working on [[thoughts-to-nostr]] Been cleaning up my z" loading="lazy">

2025-07-10 Notes | Nic Payne

2025-07-09 Notes from yesterday I have temporal stuff kind of going with postiz in a windsurf session working on [[thoughts-to-nostr]] Been cleaning up my z

pype.dev

big fan of eza and dust, I like these aliases to have some common commands at my fingertips. I often use the tree command and yes it sometimes goes too deep to actually be useful.

    alias lt='eza -T --level=2'             # Tree view, 2 levels deep
    alias ltt='eza -T --level=3'            # Tree view, 3 levels deep

    alias du1='dust -d 1'                   # Show only 1 level deep
    alias du2='dust -d 2'                   # Show 2 levels deep

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 Vimothée Chalamet shares his new favorite shell command from a...

2025-07-18T12:56:59Z

Love this dudes casual dry humor style, not afraid to poke fun at things with his dry ass satire. that being said, fc is new and as a long time fan of up arrow and !! I will be using this often.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

fc

2025-07-18T07:52:53Z

I am a linux user through and through. Desktop, server, vms, containers, everything except my phone is linux. With this I spend a lot of time in the terminal, and have been a long time user of !! to rerun the last command, but with the ability to tack something on at the beginning or end.

TIL about fc, which opens the last command in your shell history in your $EDITOR or pass in your editor -e nvim.

man fc

Rcap of how !! works #

!! pronounces bang bang and will run the last command in your history.

ls -l

!! | wc -l
# ls -l | wc -l

sudo !!
# sudo ls -l | wc -l

!!:s/-l/-l \/tmp
# sudo ls -l /tmp | wc -l

`fc` enters the chat #

Now making complex edits in your shell can be a bit of a chore, so fc moves this work to your $EDITOR.

fc

This pops open your $EDITOR with the last command in your history.

sudo ls -l | wc -l

Shell History #

fc shows up in shell history, but !! does not, !! gets replaced by the command that it becomes.

Up Arrow #

yaya yaya, I know you can also up-arrow c-e, but what fun is that, it’s barely a flex. fc just looks big brained and like you really know what you are doing.

💭 Quickshell

2025-07-16T00:30:48Z

Quickshell

A fully user customizable desktop shell

quickshell · quickshell.org

This has to be the most incredible looking Desktop experience I’ve ever seen, riced to the nines, more polished than macos, more features than kde plasma, this looks incredible and I want to try it and feel it.

https://quickshell.org/assets/showcase/end4.mp4

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 Stop Complaining About Ubuntu...Just Switch To Arch Already! -...

2025-07-15T01:48:46Z

DT says it so well in this video, I’ve never really been one to shit on software projects, with maybe a VERY small handful of exceptions. The shitting on ubuntu always rubbed me wrong, shitting on flatpak and snap I never got, shitting on systemd because of Leonard Pottering I never got, DT puts it in such good words here. If you don’t like it you are probably not the target audience.

If Ubuntu is too bloated, don’t try to debloat it, this is not windows, we have options, Ubuntu is one option and so much is intertwined together in something like Ubuntu if you think you want to try to “debloat” it good luck. If you have a problem with Snaps, this is probably not for you. You are probably looking for a distro with more control, probably something that you choose everything for.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 I was wrong - YouTube

2025-07-04T16:53:47Z

Never did I think I would see the day that theprimeagen decided to run archlinux. Furthermore him to start ricing it, EVEN furthermore, Pewdiepie runs arch now, and thinks you should too?? and is promoting it on one of the largest YouTube channels ever?? Even DHH is getting in the mix with omarchy Such a cool transistion to see everyone find their way to linux and diving deep into the freedom and customization.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

gpg setup for kdewallet

2025-07-04T13:52:43Z

I’m trying to setup gpg for kdewallet on archlinux with hyprland so that brave shuts up. I’ve tried this, but brave still complains about the wallet setup, so this post is to be continued.

sudo pacman -S gnupg
gpg --full-generate-key
# use RSA
# key length 4096
# passphrase
gpg --list-keys

brightnessctl adjust screen brightness

2025-06-11T08:42:36Z

Today I discovered brightnessctl to adjust the screen brightness on my AwesomeWM machine. Its a command line utility that you can use to adjust the brightness of your screen. A command line interface like this gives you the ability to bind keys with something like [[xbindkeys]] or your window manager configuration.

sudo apt install brightnessctl
# or 
paru -S brightnessctl

Now that you have it installed you can use it to adjust the brightness of your screen, this worked particularly well for my laptop screen, I don’t think this works for monitors, in my experience they are usually controlled by the built in osd.

# Increase brightness by 10%
brightnessctl set +10%
# Decrease brightness by 10%
brightnessctl set 10%-
# Set brightness to 50%
brightnessctl set 50%
# Set brightness to 100%
brightnessctl set 100%

Note

on my machine I had to use `sudo` to run the command, otherwise I got the following error:

Can't modify brightness: Permission denied

You should run this program with root privileges.
Alternatively, get write permissions for device files.

💭 Arch Wizard Brodie Robertson vs My Mac Life - Will He Convert ...

2025-06-07T01:05:25Z

I’ve never heard of niri, or a scrolling window manager, it looks quite interesting. I think tiling window manager misses out on named sessions and hotkey straight to tmux sessions, Brodi mentions not using tmux right before this segment. Niri looks quite interesting, but looks like it suffers specificity. maybe there are other tools that allow me to jump straight to something like brave, or steam, but I don’t see how I could jump to a specific terminal.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

unset multiple environment variables

2025-06-03T11:21:11Z

You can unset multiple environment variables at once. I did not know this was a thing, its something that ended up happening organically on a call and asking someone to run unset. They had never done it before and did not know how it works, but did exactly as I said instead of what I meant. I like this handy shortcut doing it in one line rather than each one individually, I will be using this in the future. You might need this for something like running aws cli commands with localstack.

unset AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY AWS_DEFAULT_REGION

i3lock on AwesomeWM

2025-06-02T14:40:56Z

i3lock is a fantastic lockscreen for tiling window managers.

If you are using a tiling window manager within a public space you need to add a lockscreen. I have one machine that I take with me to a public space. Its secure enough that I can leave it, but not secure enough that I want to leave it unlocked. So when I need to leave it behind for the restroom I need to lock it up.

arch wiki

paru -S i3lock
# or
apt install i3lock

Now that you have i3lock installed lets lock that screen.

# lock it with a pure white flashbang
i3lock

# lock it with a black background
i3lock -c 000000

# lock it with a custom color
i3lock -c 2e1330

# lock it with a wallpaper
i3lock -c 000000 ~/Pictures/Wallpapers/mywallpaper.png

You can use your window manager or something more generic like xbindkeys to set a hotkey. This way you don’t have to open a terminal and type out the command every time you leave your desk. You can just press something like SUPER+L like you would on other OS’s.

Fancy #

If you like it a bit fancier, you can use i3lock-fancy, it can blur, pixelate, and greyscale your current screen. I did not really like this because you can still tell what is going on the screen. It’s probably secure enough and looks better, but I went with regular i3lock.

paru -S i3lock-fancy-git
# or
apt install i3lock-fancy

💭 Command Line | gitignore.io / docs

2025-05-29T16:22:42Z

Command Line | gitignore.io / docs

To run gitignore.io from your command line you need an active internet connection and an environment function. You need to add a function to your environment that lets you access the gitignore.io API.

docs.gitignore.io

This is a very interesting cli, its so simple. I stumbled accross the gi command awhile back and was like pfft, I dont want to install something for that. Didn’t even realize that you don’t install it, its just http. Their install instructions lead you to putting a curl funtion in your bashrc.

function gi() { curl -sLw \"\\\n\" https://www.toptal.com/developers/gitignore/api/\$@ ;}

This now has me wondering “What else can build like this?”

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

Linux Is About Choice

2025-05-27T13:37:00Z

This Luke Smith video came across my feed Linux, Bitcoin: When Tech Projects Become “Too Popular…” Don’t forget the goal.. It’s interesting to hear his perspective about Linux, FOSS, Free Software being the end goal, and that we are loosing sight of the goal. This sentiment really aligns with the early FOSS movement from Stallman, but was this ever the goal?

Taken over by apathetic interests #

Luke talks about these projects getting taken over by people with no passion for the original goal of freedom and privacy. They want the projects to grow, get bigger, and become mainstream. This feels exactly the opposite of anything Luke would want, so my bias alarm goes off here. Honestly I do see some of the grossness of projects like this that were grassroots, for freedom and privacy get taken over for money grabs. I’m completely out on bitcoin so I cannot make any comment there, but I Truly believe that the Linux kernel is not a money grab as Luke makes the new face of bitcoin sound.

Corporate backing is OK #

I’m going to take a counter point here from Luke, that it’s OK for Companies to be made, and money to be made on FOSS. While the Nats relicense has caused a Kerfuffle, I appreciate their side of the relicense, as a they discussed on The Changelog: NATS and the CNCF kerfuffle | Derek Collison shares NATS/Synadia story. They had a struggle to make money as a small project in the Linux Foundation. Large companies would not pay for their service as they have already paid into the foundation. They chose to relicense new versions of the server so such that it would become FOSS after 2 years. This gives them time to pay for their development.

Rug pulls, price gouging, and other bad behaviors aside Funding is overall good for the FOSS community. It is a good thing that Torvalds is able to make a living from the work he has done on the kernel.

FOSS hardware #

Luke mentions FOSS hardware in the video. I think this is great and really plays to the longevity of a product and limiting e-waste. I think the main goal here is not necessarily openness, but repairability. At least for me. I could not care to build out ram or hard drives from scratch, but what I do care is that I can repair my hardware. I don’t want my investments into hardware to go to waste and be thrown away because of a component failure. I get that we are largely there on the mobile side, and that really sucks.

Choice #

I really feel like the goal of Linux is choice, its not locked into FOSS. FOSS is a great option, and is really only there for Linux, and not at all an option for Windows or MacOS. I’d argue that at the beginning of the Linux project there was no choice your only real option was closed source all the way around. These days not only do we have the freedom to choose an OS, but we can choose how we want our Linux. If you want to deploy Linux at a large company, and you are willing to pay for support from someone like Red Hat or Canonical that’s an option, but its not the only option.

macOS Power User Asks DistroTube: Which Linux Never Breaks?

In this interview DT talks about getting new hardware sent to him, and they ask do you want us to put Linux on it? His answer, No, it doesn’t matter, I wont use it anyways. You see DT is not here purely for the Linux, he is here for the choice. His choice is to pick every last config option, and tailor every installed executable to fit his needs. His preferences happen to be in the full Free as in Freedom realm.

Infinite Linux #

Linux has infinite options of configuration, hundreds of distros, hundreds of desktop environments. You can Choose a Floating window manager, Tiling window manager, or go full TTY with no graphical environment. With MacOS and Windows you get it the way they decide you get it with a level of configuration that pales in comparison to what you get on Linux.

Immutable Linux #

A very recent and modern example of this is immutable or cloud native distros, the idea is that they are more like an appliance, giving you less freedom and control than you typically would have on a normal bare metal install of linux, bootc is just really taking off this year. I’m currently running one of these distro’s called bazzite and I am really loving it. I have a couple of desktop applications that I install from the discover store as flatpaks, but mosty I live in a fully custom distrobox that I put every ounce of ricing and configuration that I want into. For me it has been ultra reliable, rather than rolling my own thing that is a combination of packages unique to me, I have something that is rock hard in the community and I run versioned images of my devtainer that make it easy for me to roll back on if something were to break.

For me this is feedom, I get to fully control the environment I really care about, my terminal. I get a window manager with 9 workspaces that I can hotkey to, and I never miss a game night with my kids due to some weird graphics issue.

Freedom #

In the end Linux was born of this freedom, and is an important part. While its great that there are players here that are able to make money, be good citizens and give back, there are bad players. Even if all the players are good not everyone is going to agree and money will only spoil their hurt feelings even more. If Linux looses this freedom of choice and becomes something that you only get littered with Closed source software, or on paid platforms, or imposes any level of restrictions on to you its lost, and we need a new revolution to rise in its ashes.

Fin #

I’m trying to write more free flowing articles philosophical in nature. There are probably grammatical and spelling misttakes. There are probably things I will re-read in 6 months and not agree with, but these are my free flowing thoughts right now. I think we are missing really good opinion pieces on the internet these days. Too much AI generated, “Hello World”, shoulda read the docs BS. I subscribe to a lot of other good folks that give their real opinions you can find them on my blogroll.

💭 The Worst OS - YouTube

2025-05-01T12:54:13Z

How is usability and it doing the thing I paid for it to do a selling point?? Any time I’ve touched a windows machine in the past 7 years has felt awkward, I have no idea where things are now, but they look so much worse.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 The Worst OS - YouTube

2025-05-01T12:54:12Z

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

backup distrobox image

2025-04-09T17:35:50Z

Today I’m upgrading my distrobox, but don’t want to end up in a situation where I can’t get anything done becauase I work out of my distrobox.

distrobox ls
distrobox stop devtainer
distrobox create --clone devtainer --name devtainer-20250409
distrobox enter devtainer

Use pbpaste for clean shell history

2025-03-17T12:00:00Z

Using pbpaste for command substitution keeps sensitive or long URLs out of your shell history. Instead of typing git clone https://github.com/user/repo-with-long-name.git, copy the URL to clipboard and run git clone "$(pbpaste)". This prevents the URL from appearing in ~/.bash_history or ~/.zsh_history.

To get pbpaste working on both Xorg and Wayland, add this to your shell config:

if [[ $(command -v wl-copy) ]]; then
    alias pbcopy='wl-copy'
    pbpaste() { wl-paste; }
elif [[ $(command -v xclip) ]]; then
    alias pbcopy='xclip -selection clipboard'
    pbpaste() { xclip -selection clipboard -o; }
fi

The function approach (instead of alias) enables command substitution, while the quotes around $(pbpaste) handle spaces and special characters safely.

Now you can use it.

git clone "$(pbpaste)"

More importantly secrets can stay out of your history.

export GITHUB_TOKEN="$(pbpaste)"
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="$(pbpaste)"
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="$(pbpaste)"
export DATABASE_URL="$(pbpaste)"

aptitude why

2025-02-11T13:55:04Z

Today I ran into an interesting question, why am I being asked to configure tzdata while installing npm. Turns out that the aptitude cli has a why command that very handily nails down why you have something installed on a debian based system.

Install aptitude #

apt install aptitude

Why tzdata #

Now we can query why we need tzdata and see the full chain with the root package being npm.

root@47685221fb82:/# aptitude why tzdata
i   npm        Depends  node-gyp
i A node-gyp   Depends  gyp (>= 0.1+20200513gitcaa6002)
i A gyp        Depends  python3:any
i A python3    Provides python3:any
i A python3    Depends  python3.12 (>= 3.12.3-0~)
i A python3.12 Depends  tzdata

configure timezone

2025-02-10T13:35:24Z

Today I ran into this interactive prompt on ubuntu while installing node and npm, and I do not want to manually configure this interactively every time I run an install, moreso in docker I do not have the interactive terminal to do so.

Configuring tzdata
------------------

Please select the geographic area in which you live. Subsequent configuration questions will narrow this down by presenting a list of cities, representing the time zones in which they are located.

  1. Africa  2. America  3. Antarctica  4. Arctic  5. Asia  6. Atlantic  7. Australia  8. Europe  9. Indian  10. Pacific  11. Etc  12. Legacy
Geographic area:

Why tzdata #

Checking aptitude why tzdata it shows that the chain goes back through npm.

root@47685221fb82:/# aptitude why tzdata
i   npm        Depends  node-gyp
i A node-gyp   Depends  gyp (>= 0.1+20200513gitcaa6002)
i A gyp        Depends  python3:any
i A python3    Provides python3:any
i A python3    Depends  python3.12 (>= 3.12.3-0~)
i A python3.12 Depends  tzdata

The solution, configure tzdata #

export TZ="America/Chicago"
export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
apt update
apt install tzdata -y
ln -fs /usr/share/zoneinfo/$TZ /etc/localtime
dpkg-reconfigure -f noninteractive tzdata

DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive

This is required, because apt installing tzdata will trigger the

interactive prompt. You will manually configure it in the next two steps.

bc

2025-02-08T09:30:08Z

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03KsS09YS4E&t=610s

Today I learned about the basic calculator, bc. At the very end of this video prime uses it to add numbers in vim.

REPL #

You can start a calculator repl at the command line, by running bc.

Vim #

Since bc supports standard unix pipes you can easily pipe data from vim into bc and back out using !!bc. All you need is a string of math on the line you want to calculate, go to normal mode and run !!bc to get the answer.

Traditionally I will open my system calculator or ipython to do something like this.

To keep the equation and the result in the same line you can send the equation to stderr and the result to stdout using tee.

:.!tee >(cat >&2) | bc

💭 Releases · bootandy/dust

2025-01-19T18:58:42Z

GitHub - bootandy/dust: A more intuitive version of du in rust

A more intuitive version of du in rust. Contribute to bootandy/dust development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub · github.com

dust is one of my favorite rust rewrite tools. Its so useful for narrowing down file system bloat and cleaning up some disk space on your nearly full disks. It runs right in your terminal and gives you a nice bar graph on the top directories in use.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

nvim-manager

2025-01-12T21:14:19Z

I recently built a cli application as a nearly-one-shot-app called nvim-manager. It manages your nvim dotfiles install.

Why #

How is nvim manager any better #

nvim-manager allows you to install pinned versions of your dotfiles, your friends dotfiles, and distros in ~/.config. This allows you to have stable versions that will not break installed while you change things.

I’m sure most of us have experienced the pain of installing one plugin, only to update all of your plugins and break something.

Or, you have small changes on every machine you use, because they are all just a bit different and now you have big merge conflicts to deal with.

All of this aside you can install a distro to get you by, or a known working version of your own dotfiles.

So all these versions in ~/.config #

ya, thats the magic of NVIM_APPNAME, I can boot up any of these intalled working versions in an instant with NVIM_APPNAME=nvim-waylonwalker-v0.0.1 nvim. I can still cowboy up and break my main install, but as long as I am diligent to keep these installs untouched I will always have a version to fall back to in that moment of need.

So what do I need to do? #

start tagging your dotfiles as you hit stable versions
Install curl https://i.jpillora.com/waylonwalker/nvim-manager | bash
Add some env variables to your shell startup (~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc for example)
Install that pinned version of your dotfiles nvim-manager install v0.0.1
Install a distro nvim-manager install --distro astronvim

Here are those environment variables I was talking about, set them to use your dotfiles repo, name it what you like, and set your NVIM_APPNAME if you want to default to a stable nvim and force yourself to unset NVIM_APPNAME to live on the edge.

Install nvim-manager #

apt install curl git unzip
curl https://i.jpillora.com/MordechaiHadad/bob | bash
bob install nightly
bob use nightly
ln -s ~/.local/share/bob/nvim-bin/nvim ~/.local/bin
curl https://i.jpillora.com/waylonwalker/nvim-manager | bash

Install your own dotfiles #

Setup with the following environment variables.

# nvim-manager
export NVIM_MANAGER_REPO=https://github.com/WaylonWalker/devtainer
export NVIM_CONFIG_PATH=nvim/.config/nvim
export NVIM_MANAGER_INSTALL_DIR=$HOME/.config
export NVIM_MANAGER_PREFIX="nvim-waylonwalker"
export NVIM_APPNAME=${NVIM_MANAGER_PREFIX}-v0.0.1

nvim-manager install v0.0.1
nvim

Note I like installer by jpillora, I self host it for my own security, but feel free to download from GH if it makes you feel safer.

Ubuntu Container Speedrun #

Here is a speedrun to getting nvim up and running in an ubuntu container.

set -euxo
mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
export PATH=$PATH:~/.local/bin
apt update
apt install curl git unzip -y
curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh
curl https://i.jpillora.com/MordechaiHadad/bob | bash
mv bob ~/.local/bin
bob install nightly
bob use nightly
ln -s ~/.local/share/bob/nvim-bin/nvim ~/.local/bin
curl https://i.jpillora.com/waylonwalker/nvim-manager | bash
mv nvim-manager ~/.local/bin
export NVIM_MANAGER_REPO=https://github.com/WaylonWalker/devtainer
export NVIM_CONFIG_PATH=nvim/.config/nvim
export NVIM_MANAGER_INSTALL_DIR=$HOME/.config
export NVIM_MANAGER_PREFIX="nvim-waylonwalker"
export NVIM_APPNAME=${NVIM_MANAGER_PREFIX}-v0.0.1
nvim-manager install v0.0.1
nvim-manager install --distro lazyvim
nvim-manager install --distro astronvim
nvim-manager install --distro nvchad
nvim-manager install --distro kickstart
nvim-manager install --distro lunarvim

# plugins like treesiter need gcc and make
apt install gcc make -y
export TZ="America/Chicago"
export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
apt update
apt install tzdata -y
ln -fs /usr/share/zoneinfo/$TZ /etc/localtime
dpkg-reconfigure -f noninteractive tzdata
# Some of the mason installs need npm
apt install nodejs npm -y
# plugins like telescope require ripgrep
apt install fzf ripgrep -y

Give it a Star #

I’d appreciate a star if you find this app useful.

https://github.com/waylonwalker/nvim-manager

💭 Why You Should Game on Linux (feat. GloriousEggroll of Nobara)...

2025-01-11T01:38:57Z

This man is responsible for making gaming on linux what it is today. Such a heartfelt story to hear that reviving his dad’s machine was at the core of what drove him to do what he has done for the wider gaming on linux community. Update on your schedule, remove all the tracking and bloatware, this is what drove him to start using linux before making it accessible for his Dad.

But really do update, this is not your 2002 PHP box, things need updated and regular updates help the process.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 curl with partial files | daniel.haxx.se

2024-12-30T21:29:52Z

curl with partial files

Back in September 2023, we extended the curl command line tool with a new fairly advanced and flexible variable system. Using this, users can use files, environment variables and more in a powerful...

daniel.haxx.se · daniel.haxx.se

This is a cool new feature coming to bash, I can’t think of a use case I have out of the gate, but it looks cool. I’m thinking this might be good to keep in the back pocket for something like CI where I don’t have a hightly tuned bashrc file, and I want a dynamic curl request based on some state that exists as a fille.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 Hybrid Cloud Show – Episode 20 - YouTube

2024-12-28T04:58:50Z

Red Hat has donated the whole open alternative to docker to the CNCF, the hosts weigh in with thier opinions all being pretty positive as they seem to be a legitimate donation and not dumping crap on open source.

podman
podman-desktop
buildah
compose-fs
podman
bootc
scopio

Personally I’ve been running podman exclusively at home since switching to Bazzite in August. I’d like to use buildah in ci. I gave it a try, but was unable to swap out my use of kaniko for buildah, I will get there, but it was not quite as drop in as I wanted.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

setting up ucore-zfs

2024-12-27T08:55:50Z

I just setup my oldest hardware on the newest hotest server distro ucore-zfs. This is a gateway FX6860 manufactured in 2010.

Immutable is the future #

My current boot log shows that I first started daily driving bazzite back in August 2024. I’ve been hapily using it since my arch install was plaugued with a crippling display driver error, or something that would lock the display for minutes every 30s or so, it became unusable. I switched because this is what I put my son on and it was working great for him.

waylon@razorcrest:~$ journalctl --list-boots
IDX BOOT ID                          FIRST ENTRY                 LAST ENTRY
-19 7e6e154d2609407da24fa12814eadbd7 Thu 2024-08-29 16:15:15 CDT Thu 2024-08-29 17:37:25 CDT

Four months later and I am really loving the immutable distro experience. My base system gets fresh reliable updates, and I barely install anything directly on it, a handful of things are snaps or flatpaks from the discover store, but my main workflow is now in distrobox. It has been rock solid reliable, and just works.

The Hardware #

This gem is running a an intel i7-2600 (4) @ 3.80 ghz with 16gb of ram. I’ve maxed out the ram that the motherboard will allow me. I may have even forgot about this limitation and ordered a 2x32gb setup for it and it did nothing. That’s now sitting in my new k3s master node.

Here’s a B&H photo post of the machine, she is big and heavy but still working.

I’m a big fan of keeping these old machines running and avoiding the e-waste pile, great for running a home lab. Admittedly this is one is probably on its last leg, dell optiplexes are pretty cheap and run circles around this one, so this one is become my experimental setup for trying new things like core-os.

Get Password Hash #

We will need to create a password hash for the root user to put into our ignition file.

podman run -ti --rm quay.io/coreos/mkpasswd --method=yescrypt
Password:
$y$j9T$0ZsoVynV7y0Z7/l6588Ba1$VZT0uCGP0CnYSX/EArCvYMuo3q.gnyOnk1RO6.HDNDB

Get SSH Pub Key #

Generate an ssh key using the ssh-keygen command.

$ ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "waylon@waylonwalker.com"
Generating public/private ed25519 key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/var/home/core/.ssh/id_ed25519):
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in /var/home/core/.ssh/id_ed25519
Your public key has been saved in /var/home/core/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub
The key fingerprint is:
SHA256:xVJAVreKVILOnxTDxK88RyMwhdDCBMnjMSGU7rsAqwQ waylon@waylonwalker.com
The key's randomart image is:
+--[ED25519 256]--+
|oo+*oo OBo+ .    |
| o* o *.== . .   |
|.. + + oo+o .    |
| ..   o.o++.     |
|E      +S=..     |
|oo      * .      |
|o..      o       |
|+.               |
|...              |
+----[SHA256]-----+

Now copy your public key into the ignition file from your local machine

$ cat ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub
ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAIPY73r4EU9wm/26/rTpx/uvAyInmbQ/k+l04eadSahD0 waylon@waylonwalker.com

ucore-autorebase.butane #

I got my ignition file from ucore/ucore-autorebase. Put my secret values into it and used it.

https://github.com/ublue-os/ucore/blob/main/examples/ucore-autorebase.butane

variant: fcos
version: 1.4.0
passwd:
  users:
    - name: core
      ssh_authorized_keys:
        - ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAIPY73r4EU9wm/26/rTpx/uvAyInmbQ/k+l04eadSahD0 waylon@waylonwalker.com
      password_hash: $y$j9T$0ZsoVynV7y0Z7/l6588Ba1$VZT0uCGP0CnYSX/EArCvYMuo3q.gnyOnk1RO6.HDNDB
storage:
  directories:
    - path: /etc/ucore-autorebase
      mode: 0754
systemd:
  units:
    - name: ucore-unsigned-autorebase.service
      enabled: true
      contents: |
        [Unit]
        Description=uCore autorebase to unsigned OCI and reboot
        ConditionPathExists=!/etc/ucore-autorebase/unverified
        ConditionPathExists=!/etc/ucore-autorebase/signed
        After=network-online.target
        Wants=network-online.target
        [Service]
        Type=oneshot
        StandardOutput=journal+console
        ExecStart=/usr/bin/rpm-ostree rebase --bypass-driver ostree-unverified-registry:ghcr.io/ublue-os/ucore:stable
        ExecStart=/usr/bin/touch /etc/ucore-autorebase/unverified
        ExecStart=/usr/bin/systemctl disable ucore-unsigned-autorebase.service
        ExecStart=/usr/bin/systemctl reboot
        [Install]
        WantedBy=multi-user.target
    - name: ucore-signed-autorebase.service
      enabled: true
      contents: |
        [Unit]
        Description=uCore autorebase to signed OCI and reboot
        ConditionPathExists=/etc/ucore-autorebase/unverified
        ConditionPathExists=!/etc/ucore-autorebase/verified
        After=network-online.target
        Wants=network-online.target
        [Service]
        Type=oneshot
        StandardOutput=journal+console
        ExecStart=/usr/bin/rpm-ostree rebase --bypass-driver ostree-image-signed:docker://ghcr.io/ublue-os/ucore:stable
        ExecStart=/usr/bin/touch /etc/ucore-autorebase/signed
        ExecStart=/usr/bin/systemctl disable ucore-signed-autorebase.service
        ExecStart=/usr/bin/systemctl reboot
        [Install]
        WantedBy=multi-user.target butane

Creating an ignition file #

podman run --interactive --rm --security-opt label=disable \
        --volume ${PWD}:/pwd --workdir /pwd quay.io/coreos/butane:release \
        --pretty --strict ucore-autorebase.butane >transpiled_config.ign

Getting zfs #

Now this is where I realized I went wrong and wished I would have paid attention to the autorebase.butane file, it did not use the zfs flavor ucore. Luckily they make it wildly easy to rebase between these base images.

I needed to run this to rebase into the zfs flavor.

/usr/bin/rpm-ostree rebase --bypass-driver ostree-unverified-registry:ghcr.io/ublue-os/ucore:stable-zfs

This was the output.

core@falcon-FX6860:~$ /usr/bin/rpm-ostree rebase --bypass-driver ostree-unverified-registry:ghcr.io/ublue-os/ucore:stable-zfs
==== AUTHENTICATING FOR org.projectatomic.rpmostree1.rebase ====
Authentication is required to switch to a different base OS
Authenticating as: CoreOS Admin (core)
Password:
==== AUTHENTICATION COMPLETE ====
Pulling manifest: ostree-unverified-registry:ghcr.io/ublue-os/ucore:stable-zfs
Importing: ostree-unverified-registry:ghcr.io/ublue-os/ucore:stable-zfs (digest: sha256:8ebae90f6844949044c026d7ba05c035956992b68e13bdcbd9158a37beda571e)
ostree chunk layers already present: 51
custom layers needed: 2 (492.9 MB)
Fetching layer sha256:67f3c0e0e0fe (269.7 MB)... done
Fetching layer sha256:25992805e895 (223.1 MB)... done
Staging deployment... done
Upgraded:
  cockpit-bridge 330-1.fc41 -> 331-1.fc41
  cockpit-networkmanager 330-1.fc41 -> 331-1.fc41
  cockpit-selinux 330-1.fc41 -> 331-1.fc41
  cockpit-storaged 330-1.fc41 -> 331-1.fc41
  cockpit-system 330-1.fc41 -> 331-1.fc41
Added:
  groff-base-1.23.0-7.fc41.x86_64
  kmod-zfs-2.2.7-1.fc41.x86_64
  libnvpair3-2.2.7-1.fc41.x86_64
  libuutil3-2.2.7-1.fc41.x86_64
  libzfs5-2.2.7-1.fc41.x86_64
  libzpool5-2.2.7-1.fc41.x86_64
  lm_sensors-libs-3.6.0-20.fc41.x86_64
  lzop-1.04-15.fc41.x86_64
  mbuffer-20241007-1.fc41.x86_64
  perl-AutoLoader-5.74-512.fc41.noarch
  perl-B-1.89-512.fc41.x86_64
  perl-Capture-Tiny-0.48-21.fc41.noarch
  perl-Carp-1.54-511.fc41.noarch
  perl-Class-Struct-0.68-512.fc41.noarch
  perl-Config-IniFiles-3.000003-14.fc41.noarch
  perl-Data-Dumper-2.189-512.fc41.x86_64
  perl-Digest-1.20-511.fc41.noarch
  perl-Digest-MD5-2.59-5.fc41.x86_64
  perl-DynaLoader-1.56-512.fc41.x86_64
  perl-Encode-4:3.21-511.fc41.x86_64
  perl-Errno-1.38-512.fc41.x86_64
  perl-Exporter-5.78-511.fc41.noarch
  perl-Fcntl-1.18-512.fc41.x86_64
  perl-File-Basename-2.86-512.fc41.noarch
  perl-File-Path-2.18-511.fc41.noarch
  perl-File-Temp-1:0.231.100-511.fc41.noarch
  perl-File-stat-1.14-512.fc41.noarch
  perl-FileHandle-2.05-512.fc41.noarch
  perl-Getopt-Long-1:2.58-2.fc41.noarch
  perl-Getopt-Std-1.14-512.fc41.noarch
  perl-HTTP-Tiny-0.090-1.fc41.noarch
  perl-IO-1.55-512.fc41.x86_64
  perl-IO-Socket-IP-0.43-1.fc41.noarch
  perl-IO-Socket-SSL-2.089-1.fc41.noarch
  perl-IO-stringy-2.113-15.fc41.noarch
  perl-IPC-Open3-1.22-512.fc41.noarch
  perl-MIME-Base32-1.303-21.fc41.noarch
  perl-MIME-Base64-3.16-511.fc41.x86_64
  perl-NDBM_File-1.17-512.fc41.x86_64
  perl-Net-SSLeay-1.94-7.fc41.x86_64
  perl-POSIX-2.20-512.fc41.x86_64
  perl-PathTools-3.91-511.fc41.x86_64
  perl-Pod-Escapes-1:1.07-511.fc41.noarch
  perl-Pod-Perldoc-3.28.01-512.fc41.noarch
  perl-Pod-Simple-1:3.45-511.fc41.noarch
  perl-Pod-Usage-4:2.03-511.fc41.noarch
  perl-Scalar-List-Utils-5:1.68-1.fc41.x86_64
  perl-SelectSaver-1.02-512.fc41.noarch
  perl-Socket-4:2.038-511.fc41.x86_64
  perl-Storable-1:3.32-511.fc41.x86_64
  perl-Symbol-1.09-512.fc41.noarch
  perl-Sys-Hostname-1.25-512.fc41.x86_64
  perl-Term-ANSIColor-5.01-512.fc41.noarch
  perl-Term-Cap-1.18-511.fc41.noarch
  perl-Text-ParseWords-3.31-511.fc41.noarch
  perl-Text-Tabs+Wrap-2024.001-511.fc41.noarch
  perl-Time-Local-2:1.350-511.fc41.noarch
  perl-URI-5.30-1.fc41.noarch
  perl-base-2.27-512.fc41.noarch
  perl-constant-1.33-512.fc41.noarch
  perl-if-0.61.000-512.fc41.noarch
  perl-interpreter-4:5.40.0-512.fc41.x86_64
  perl-libnet-3.15-512.fc41.noarch
  perl-libs-4:5.40.0-512.fc41.x86_64
  perl-locale-1.12-512.fc41.noarch
  perl-mro-1.29-512.fc41.x86_64
  perl-overload-1.37-512.fc41.noarch
  perl-overloading-0.02-512.fc41.noarch
  perl-parent-1:0.242-1.fc41.noarch
  perl-podlators-1:6.0.2-2.fc41.noarch
  perl-vars-1.05-512.fc41.noarch
  pv-1.8.14-2.fc41.x86_64
  python3-cffi-1.17.0-1.fc41.x86_64
  python3-ply-3.11-25.fc41.noarch
  python3-pycparser-2.20-18.fc41.noarch
  python3-pyzfs-2.2.7-1.fc41.noarch
  sanoid-2.2.0-1.fc41.ucore2.noarch
  sysstat-12.7.6-2.fc41.x86_64
  zfs-2.2.7-1.fc41.x86_64
  zfs-dracut-2.2.7-1.fc41.noarch
Changes queued for next boot. Run "systemctl reboot" to start a reboot

For some reason I double checked, and runnign it a second time gave me this.

core@falcon-FX6860:~$ sudo rpm-ostree rebase ostree-image-signed:docker://ghcr.io/ublue-os/ucore:stable-zfs
Pulling manifest: ostree-image-signed:docker://ghcr.io/ublue-os/ucore:stable-zfs
Staging deployment... done
Changes queued for next boot. Run "systemctl reboot" to start a reboot

ZFS #

Once I rebooted I had all of my necessary zfs utilities that I needed.

connecting nfs #

The last thing I wanted to do was to mount an nfs share from my master node so that they can share a storage backend. I found that nfs was already in the host and ready to go.

sudo mkdir /mnt/vault/nfs
sudo mount -t nfs <nfs server ip>:/mnt/vault/nfs /mnt/vault/nfs

💭 Ubuntu Summit 2024 | UMU - A unified tool for easily running y...

2024-12-26T16:47:13Z

Damn Glorious Eggrolls is still making gaming on linux better. Of course its containerization that drives everything on linux these days. This is a pretty badass talk. Umu is already running in steam and bazzite. Bazzite gamemode uses this to get a gamescope session running.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 Dedicated Servers | Intel Servers | AMD Servers - Dedicated Ho...

2024-12-24T20:29:13Z

Dedicated Servers | Intel Servers | AMD Servers - Dedicated Hosting

reliablesite.net

Dax talked about this in a recent How about tomorrow podcast https://thoughts.waylonwalker.com/post/461. He is using it as his dev machine, he just ssh’s in and devs on it. Feels like quite an interesting workflow, their prices seem competitive, but as a cheap ass homelabber I see their prices and think I could grab a used optiplex for the cost of a month or two of these and probably wouldn’t know the difference. DAX mentions longer compile times so maybe he does notice.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 Talking with Typecraft - YouTube

2024-12-24T20:24:42Z

This is a pretty great episode talking shop with typecraft. They talk setups, cameras, content creation. I found them talking about their linux setups particularly interesting. Dax talked about his flow from building his own machines to using reliablesite.com.

tmux default leader #

Dax hates on c-a, both typecraft and dax use c-s, which normally freezes a terminal, we can all agree that is useless. I use the default c-b, it seems fine for me.

type crafts setup #

Ubuntu
Ghosty
Tmux
Nvim
Ruby

Selling coffee without a web front end #

Dax talks about terminal.shop and how they originally planned to have a web front end, but after they had so much success they stuck with it. now they are leaning harder into it and are building out integrations with a bunch of languages and an api, but no front end.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 casey/just: 🤖 Just a command runner

2024-12-14T17:04:06Z

GitHub - casey/just: 🤖 Just a command runner

🤖 Just a command runner. Contribute to casey/just development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub · github.com

new versions of just now come with color variables already set.

[group('manage')]
version:
    #!/usr/bin/env bash
    version=$(cat version)
    echo current version {{BOLD}}{{GREEN}}$version{{NORMAL}}

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 pipedream/justfile at main · thechangelog/pipedream

2024-12-14T16:54:34Z

pipely/justfile at main · thechangelog/pipely

I like the idea of having like this 20-line Varnish config that we deploy around the world, and it’s like: Look at our CDN! - thechangelog/pipely

GitHub · github.com

I found this nugget in thechangelogs justfile, it lets you add color to your justfile with variables quite easily.

# https://linux.101hacks.com/ps1-examples/prompt-color-using-tput/

_BOLD := "$(tput bold)"
_RESET := "$(tput sgr0)"
_BLACK := "$(tput bold)$(tput setaf 0)"
_RED := "$(tput bold)$(tput setaf 1)"
_GREEN := "$(tput bold)$(tput setaf 2)"
_YELLOW := "$(tput bold)$(tput setaf 3)"
_BLUE := "$(tput bold)$(tput setaf 4)"
_MAGENTA := "$(tput bold)$(tput setaf 5)"
_CYAN := "$(tput bold)$(tput setaf 6)"
_WHITE := "$(tput bold)$(tput setaf 7)"
_BLACKB := "$(tput bold)$(tput setab 0)"
_REDB := "$(tput setab 1)$(tput setaf 0)"
_GREENB := "$(tput setab 2)$(tput setaf 0)"
_YELLOWB := "$(tput setab 3)$(tput setaf 0)"
_BLUEB := "$(tput setab 4)$(tput setaf 0)"
_MAGENTAB := "$(tput setab 5)$(tput setaf 0)"
_CYANB := "$(tput setab 6)$(tput setaf 0)"
_WHITEB := "$(tput setab 7)$(tput setaf 0)"

Usage

echo:
    echo {{_BOLD}}{{_GREEN}}hello there{{_RESET}}

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 hostnamectl to easily change hostname | Pype.dev

2024-12-06T14:30:41Z

hostnamectl to easily change hostname | Nic Payne

hostnamectl is apparently a linux utility for easily changing your hostname in a variety of ways I learned there's transient and static hostnames, so that&

pype.dev

For some reason the ublue ecosystem does not prompt you to set your hostname on install and you get a hostname like bazzite showing up. Looks like this is the fix.

hostnamectl –static hostname babyblue-aurora

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 linux - What is stored in /dev/pts files and can we open them?...

2024-07-07T01:08:38Z

External Link

unix.stackexchange.com

today I learned that /dev/pts is a pseudo-tty. It amazes me how much linux is still built around things like hardware terminals.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 pacman/Tips and tricks - ArchWiki

2024-07-06T16:52:09Z

pacman/Tips and tricks - ArchWiki

wiki.archlinux.org

The arch wiki is always full of good content, and pacman tips and tricks does not disappoint. Today I discovered this command to remove orphaned dependencies on my system.

pacman -Qdtq | pacman -Rns -

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 Inside 22,734 Steam games | daniel.haxx.se

2024-07-06T16:48:21Z

Inside 22,734 Steam games

About a year ago I blogged about games that use curl. In that post I listed a bunch of well-known titles I knew use curl and there was a list of 136 additional games giving credit to curl. Kind of ...

daniel.haxx.se · daniel.haxx.se

Interesting to see that curl is used in so many places. I often think of things like games being so windows centric and curl being so linux centric I don’t even think of these things crossing paths as much as they do.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 wcurl is here | daniel.haxx.se

2024-07-06T16:46:19Z

wcurl is here

Users tell us that remembering what curl options to use when they just want to download the contents of a URL is hard. This is one often repeated reason why some users reach for wget instead of cur...

daniel.haxx.se · daniel.haxx.se

interesting, seems like such a simple way to completely remove the need of a whole other cli. No offense to anyone working on wget, but generally I use it out of lazyness or something wierd is happening and I am looking for a second opinion. Cool to know that wcurl exists and will start shipping with curl.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

arch remove orphaned packages

2024-07-06T11:34:31Z

playerctl fixes arch media keys

2024-06-25T18:23:41Z

I’ve long had issues with my qmk keyboard media keys on my arch install, I always thought it was on the keyboard end. Today I learned that playerctl fixes this.

paru -S playerctl

Once it is installed all of my media keys started working right away.

I played around with it a bit more and came up with a way to display the current playing title in my notifictations.

notify-send "`playerctl metadata --format '{{lc(status)}}:{{artist}}-{{album}}-{{title}}'`"

💭 podman requries qemu-system on ubuntu

2024-06-12T19:29:18Z

External Link

askubuntu.com

podman requires qemu-system on

❯ podman machine init
Looking up Podman Machine image at quay.io/podman/machine-os:5.1 to create VM
Extracting compressed file: podman-machine-default-amd64.qcow2: done
Error: exec: "qemu-img": executable file not found in $PATH

The fix to this for me was to install qemu-system before podman machine init.

sudo apt update

sudo apt install qemu-system

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 catppuccin/ulauncher: 🇺 Soothing pastel theme for Ulauncher

2024-06-07T03:59:30Z

GitHub - catppuccin/ulauncher: 🇺 Soothing pastel theme for Ulauncher

🇺 Soothing pastel theme for Ulauncher. Contribute to catppuccin/ulauncher development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub · github.com

I am using this theme for Ulauncher in arch and it looks fantastic! One line install (read it first).

python3 <(curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/catppuccin/ulauncher/main/install.py -fsSL)

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 Ulauncher — Application launcher for Linux 🐧

2024-06-07T03:58:16Z

Ulauncher — Application launcher for Linux 🐧

Download Ulauncher for Linux, discover extensions and videos, and support the project.

ulauncher.io

Just discovered this really cool launcher from the DHH distro omakub. github.com/omakub{.hoverlink}.

Ulauncher comes out of the box looking good, supports extensions, and shortcuts like I have a lot of mac launchers have. I installed it plus a theme and in no time It was looking good and launching applications.

In the past I have leaned in on rofi for task launching, it is good. I just felt it was harder to configure to get right or look good.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 basecamp/omakub: Opinionated Ubuntu Setup

2024-06-06T16:20:19Z

GitHub - basecamp/omakub: Opinionated Ubuntu Setup

Opinionated Ubuntu Setup. Contribute to basecamp/omakub development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub · github.com

This is DHH’s linux startup script. Call it a distro if you want, but he doesn’t. It’s made to take a vanilla ubuntu install and configure everything the way he likes it. There’s a number of great nuggets in here to pick up on.

No need to write bespoke configs for every essential tool just to get started or to be up on all the latest command-line tools. Omakub is an opinionated take on what Linux can be at its best.

Check it out and give it a ⭐ basecamp/omakub{.hoverlink}.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 How to Force Dark Mode on Every Website in Google Chrome

2024-06-03T18:52:25Z

How to Force Dark Mode on Every Website in Google Chrome

Do you like dark mode? Chrome now lets you forcibly enable it for every site on the web. No more blindingly bright websites.

How-To Geek · howtogeek.com

Sometimes I struggle to get my os to report dark mode to chrome, luckily there is a way to force chrome to always use dark mode.

I’ve never really gotten into dark reader and extensions like this. For some reason they all make websites look really weird to me and I don’t really care for it. What I want is websites designed to be in dark/light to always go dark, if the designer didn’t design dark just let it be light.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

tailscale ssh

2024-06-03T16:40:18Z

Tailscale allows you to ssh into all of your tailscale machines, it busts through firewalls and accross networks without complex setup. If you have used tailscale before this is an obvious no brainer. What is not obvious is that you can configure tailscale to allow ssh connections from devices within your tailnet without even a ssh daemon process running right through the tailscale daemon.

tailscale status
tailscale set --ssh

I picked this up from the tailscale youtube channel.

Tailscale

💭 Distrobox

2024-05-22T18:13:13Z

Distrobox

Use any linux distribution inside your terminal.

distrobox.it

distrobox gives you distrobox-host-exec to run commands on the host. This is handy to get access to host level clis that you probably wouldn’t want to run from the container like podman, docker, flatpak.

DESCRIPTION distrobox-host-exec lets one execute command on the host, while inside of a container.

Under the hood, distrobox-host-exec uses host-spawn a project that lets us execute commands back on the host. If the tool is not found the user will be prompted to install it.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?

2024-05-22T12:37:55Z

Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?

areweanticheatyet.com

A comprehensive community built index of anti-cheat support for linux very similar to proton, but specific to anticheat support.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 Install Pokemon TCG Live on Steam Deck - Installation Guide - ...

2024-05-11T13:27:19Z

I had no idea that you could just drop an msi installer right in steam. This worked for me, and was much easier to install pokemon tcg live in 05-2024 on ubuntu 22-04. I added the msi to steam from my downloads, hit start, failed right away like he said it would. changed compatability to proton experimental, and it opened right up.

Download the official installer from pokemon tcg
Add non steam game
click show all file types
navigate to downloaded msi
click gear icon > compatability > proton experimental
click play
profit

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

just picker

2024-05-08T20:48:23Z

just has been by go to tool for saving commands in a way that I can replay them and have team members replay them without relying on the shell history of any given machine. This is my go to default step, it lets you pick a just command to run with a fuzzy picker.

default:
  @just --list

💭 Bug #2006590 “gdm3 crashes with SIGTRAP on startup” : Bugs : g...

2024-05-02T00:54:02Z

Bug #2006590 “gdm3 crashes with SIGTRAP on startup” : Bugs : gdm3 package : Ubuntu

Suddenly this week, my GUI (ubuntu 22.10) does not open, stuck on the console text. I tried to free some space (by uninstall a app), then to check/update the paquets (dkpg).

ProblemType: Bug Distr…

Launchpad · bugs.launchpad.net

This Thread saved my son’s ubuntu 24.04 install. His was failing to start with the following error.

Gdm: GdmSession: no session desktop files installed, aborting...

https://twitter.com/_WaylonWalker/status/1785825677079441482

sudo apt install --reinstall ubuntu-session

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

showmount-e

2024-04-25T20:15:29Z

TIL how to display the list of nfs mounts on your network.

showmount -e

You can even look for mounts of other machines on your network.

showmount -e <hostname>

Redka Runs on SQLite

2024-04-22T19:54:24Z

With the liscense changes to redis there are several new forks out there. One that I am particularly interested in is redka.

curl https://i.jpillora.com/nalgeon/redka | bash
chmod +x redka
./redka database.db

We now have redis running on port 6379 that we can connect to with a redis client. And we have a sqlite database that we can inspect.

❯ sqlite3 database.db "SELECT name FROM sqlite_master;"
rkey
rkey_key_idx
rkey_etime_idx
rkey_on_type_update
rstring
rstring_pk_idx
vstring
rhash
rhash_pk_idx
rhash_key_id_idx
vhash

We can look at the values in the vstring table.

sqlite3 database.db "SELECT * from vstring;"
1|hi|hello there you||2024-04-17 01:46:26

Am I vulnerable to the xz backdoor?

2024-04-21T07:53:54Z

The main system that I am concerned about is my arch BTW machine. I found a great article from the official archlinux site covering it.

For my machine I am concerned with this line.

The xz packages prior to version 5.6.1-2 (specifically 5.6.0-1 and 5.6.1-1) contain this backdoor.

I checked my xz package with AUR.">paru, and I am good.

paru -Qii zx

arch dependencies

2024-04-20T07:42:21Z

AUR.">paru has some nice features that I rarely use, and hav to look up when I need them. Here are two commands to help with dependency management.

❯ paru -Qii nodejs
Name            : nodejs
Version         : 21.7.2-1
Description     : Evented I/O for V8 javascript
Architecture    : x86_64
URL             : https://nodejs.org/
Licenses        : MIT
Groups          : None
Provides        : None
Depends On      : icu  libuv  libnghttp2  libnghttp3  libngtcp2  openssl  zlib  brotli  c-ares
Optional Deps   : npm: nodejs package manager [installed]
Required By     : node-gyp  nodejs-nopt  npm  semver
Optional For    : None
Conflicts With  : None
Replaces        : None
Installed Size  : 46.86 MiB
Packager        : Felix Yan <felixonmars@archlinux.org>
Build Date      : Thu 04 Apr 2024 05:11:09 AM CDT
Install Date    : Mon 15 Apr 2024 07:27:02 AM CDT
Install Reason  : Installed as a dependency for another package
Install Script  : No
Validated By    : Signature
Backup Files    : None
Extended Data   : pkgtype=pkg

You can check all the packages depended on by nodejs by running the following. This is everything from all of the repos you have configured, not what you have installed.

❯ pactree --reverse --sync --depth 1 nodejs

nodejs
├─acorn
├─ansible-language-server
├─asar
├─babel-cli
├─babel-core
├─bash-language-server
├─blinksocks
├─bower
├─browserify
├─coffeescript
├─dot-language-server
├─emscripten
├─eslint
├─eslint-language-server
├─eslint_d
├─gitlab
├─gnomon
├─grunt-cli
├─gtop
├─gulp
├─hedgedoc
├─jake
├─markdownlint-cli2
├─marked
├─marked-man
├─matrix-appservice-irc
├─modclean
├─node-gyp
├─nodejs-emojione
├─nodejs-material-design-icons
├─nodejs-nopt
├─nodejs-source-map
├─nodejs-yaml
├─npm
├─openui5
├─pm2
├─prettier
├─pyright
├─rapydscript-ng
├─s3rver
├─semver
├─serverless
├─stylelint
├─stylus
├─svelte-language-server
├─tailwindcss-language-server
├─ts-node
├─typescript
├─typescript-svelte-plugin
├─uglify-js
├─vscode-css-languageserver
├─vscode-html-languageserver
├─vscode-json-languageserver
├─vue-language-server
├─vue-typescript-plugin
├─wasm-bindgen
├─web-ext
├─wrangler
├─yaml-language-server
├─yarn

💭 Arch Linux - News: The xz package has been backdoored

2024-04-16T13:00:33Z

Arch Linux - News: The xz package has been backdoored

archlinux.org

Check your system to see if you are vulnerable to the xz backdoor.

I found this line most pertanent to me.

The xz packages prior to version 5.6.1-2 (specifically 5.6.0-1 and 5.6.1-1) contain this backdoor.

Also it appears that arch is not vulnerable as it does not directly link openssh to liblzma, so the known attack vecotor is not possible. read to the end of the linked article for more.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

How to kill ollama server

2024-04-14T18:31:36Z

I recently updated ollama, and it now installs a systemd service that I was not expecting. Seems like a great option, but I hadn’t expeted this and I was able to kill it previously. It was using up gpu, and I do other things on my machine with a gpu. I tried pkill, kill, and everything, it was still coming back.

No matter what it comes back

# stop it
systemctl stop ollama.service

# disable it if you want
systemctl disable ollama.service

# confirm its status
systemctl status ollama.service

You can confirm this with the following command.

# checking running processes
ps aux | grep ollama
pgrep ollama

# checking gpu processes
gpustat --show-cmd --show-pid

Next time you want to start you can do it as before with ollama serve.

💭 How to run pods as systemd services with Podman | Enable Sysadmin

2023-09-22T01:12:19Z

How to run pods as systemd services with Podman

Podman is well known for its seamless integration into modern Linux systems, and supporting systemd is a cornerstone in these efforts. Linux commonly uses th...

redhat.com

podman comes with a nice command for generating systemd service files (units).

$ podman pod create --name=my-pod
635bcc5bb5aa0a45af4c2f5a508ebd6a02b93e69324197a06d02a12873b6d1f7

$ podman create --pod=my-pod --name=container-a -t centos top
c04be9c4ac1c93473499571f3c2ad74deb3e0c14f4f00e89c7be3643368daf0e

$ podman create --pod=my-pod --name=container-b -t centos top
b42314b2deff99f5877e76058ac315b97cfb8dc40ed02f9b1b87f21a0cf2fbff

$ cd $HOME/.config/systemd/user

$ podman generate systemd --new --files --name my-pod
/home/vrothberg/.config/systemd/user/pod-my-pod.service
/home/vrothberg/.config/systemd/user/container-container-b.service
/home/vrothberg/.config/systemd/user/container-container-a.service

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 sharkdp/bat: A cat clone with wings.

2023-08-21T13:28:06Z

GitHub - sharkdp/bat: A cat(1) clone with wings.

A cat(1) clone with wings. Contribute to sharkdp/bat development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub · github.com

Bat is my favorite pager, its the one for me that seems to just work more than the rest. colors, syntax highlighting, line numbers search, it just feels the most natural.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 Relocating the Docker root directory - IBM Documentation

2023-07-29T01:07:06Z

Relocating the Docker root directory

If the space in the file system where the Docker root directory is located is not adequate and cannot be increased, you must relocate the directory.

ibm.com

A very straightforward guide to moving your docker data, such as container storage to a different location. In my case I wanted it off of my boot drive.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 containers/aardvark-dns: Authoritative dns server for A/AAAA c...

2023-07-29T01:05:22Z

GitHub - containers/aardvark-dns: Authoritative dns server for A/AAAA container records. Forwards other request to host's /etc/resolv.conf

Authoritative dns server for A/AAAA container records. Forwards other request to host's /etc/resolv.conf - containers/aardvark-dns

GitHub · github.com

I ran into some dns issues while running podman on arch, aparantly I had missed an optional dependency of aardvark-dns for container to container dns resolution.

paru -S aardvark-dns

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 Podman - ArchWiki

2023-07-29T01:03:23Z

Podman - ArchWiki

wiki.archlinux.org

I kept running into limits in the number of subuid and subgid’s I had on my system by default. As always thank the arch wiki guide for having the most comprehensive yet consice guide to setup podman.

What I needed to do to fix the error.

usermod --add-subuids 100000-165535 --add-subgids 100000-165535 username

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 TestDisk Step By Step - CGSecurity

2023-07-29T01:00:51Z

TestDisk Step By Step

CGSecurity · cgsecurity.org

testdisk is an amazing command line utility (interactive tui) that just saved me a hard drive that was filled with data, but every machine that I plugged it into told me that it was completely unpartitioned.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 How to Manage 'Systemd' Services and Units Using 'Systemctl' i...

2023-07-28T14:59:37Z

How to Manage 'Systemd' Services and Units Using 'Systemctl' in Linux

Systemctl is a systemd utility which is responsible for Controlling the systemd system and service manager. Systemd is a collection of system management daemons, utilities and libraries which serve...

How to Manage ‘Systemd’ Services and Units Using ‘Systemctl’ in Linux · tecmint.com

A fantastic overview of the systemd cli.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 How to fix ZFS pool not importing at boot :: ./techtipsy — Her...

2023-07-28T14:59:37Z

How to fix ZFS pool not importing at boot

You have probably tried Stack Exchange and reddit at this point, so what do you have to lose?

./techtipsy · ounapuu.ee

Hacky solution to get zpool import tank to work on boot right away. This has been an issue that has plagued my system for months and no matter what dependencies I add in it never works, but adding a sleep as ExecStartPre did the trick.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 Deleting Specific Lines in a File with sed or yq

2023-07-28T14:59:37Z

Deleting Specific Lines in a File with sed or yq — Nick Janetakis

Nick Janetakis · nickjanetakis.com

sed can be a tricky beast, I often stumble when trying to pipe into it. Next time I need to use sed, I should reference this article by Nick Janetakis. He makes it looks much easier than my experience has been, and it appears to behave like a vim :%s/ substitution does, or a g/ g command.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 How to pull from images from docker.io with podman

2023-07-28T14:59:37Z

gistfile1.txt text

On void linux.

Under `/etc/containers/` there is a file called `registries.conf`. It is complemented by `man 5 containers-registries.conf`.

Change (for me lines 11-12) which say

[registries.search]
registries = []


to

[registries.search] registries = ['docker.io']

(drawn from https://www.projectatomic.io/blog/2018/05/podman-tls/) Without the above you won’t be able to use basic podman functions. You might get errors like: Error: unable to pull fedora:28: image name provided is a short name and no search registries are defined in the registries config file. Error: unable to pull stripe/stripe-cli: image name provided is a short name and no search registries are defined in the registries config file. Various documentation (redhat blog entries, man podman pages) say that dockerhub is a default, but without this step it’s clearly not.

Good luck. Feel free to use the comment box below if you have a github account.

By default podman will not pull images from docker.io and will need setup. This guide worked for me.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 LazyVim Installation

2023-07-28T14:59:37Z

🛠️ Installation | LazyVim

You can find a starter template for LazyVim here

lazyvim.org

Lately in 2023 I have been leaning on lazyvim for my new setups where I am not necessarily ready to drop my full config. It’s been pretty solid, and comes with a very nice setup out of the box, the docs are pretty fantastic as well.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

setting up paru | installing from the AUR for the first time

2023-05-27T20:22:42Z

AUR.">paru is an aur helper that allows you to use a package manager to install packages from the aur.

What’s the Aur #

The Aur is a set of community managed packages that can be installed on arch based distros.

Why a helper? #

paru just makes it easy, no clone and run makepkg. You can do everything paru can do using the built in pacman installer.

Manual Install from the Aur #

You will need to manually instal pacman from the aur in order to get started.

sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/paru.git
cd paru
makepkg -si

Installing packages with paru #

Once setup you are ready to install packages from the AUR just like the core repos.

# you can update your system using paru
paru -Syu

# you can install packages from the AUR
paru -S tailscale
paru -S prismlauncher

# even core repo packages can be installed
paru -S docker

Paru in Docker #

Here is a snippet from my devtainer dockerfile. Where I use paru to install packages from the AUR inside of a dockerfile.

FROM archlinux

RUN echo '[multilib]' >> /etc/pacman.conf && \
    echo 'Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist' >> /etc/pacman.conf && \
    pacman --noconfirm -Syyu && \
    pacman --noconfirm -S base-devel git && \
    groupadd --gid 1000 devtainer && \
    useradd --uid 1000 --gid 1000 -m -r -s /bin/bash devtainer && \
    passwd -d devtainer && \
    echo 'devtainer ALL=(ALL) ALL' > /etc/sudoers.d/devtainer && \
    mkdir -p /home/devtainer/.gnupg && \
    echo 'standard-resolver' > /home/devtainer/.gnupg/dirmngr.conf && \
    chown -R devtainer:devtainer /home/devtainer && \
    mkdir /build && \
    chown -R devtainer:devtainer /build && \
    cd /build && \
    sudo -u devtainer git clone --depth 1 https://aur.archlinux.org/paru.git && \
    cd paru && \
    sudo -u devtainer makepkg --noconfirm -si && \
    sed -i 's/#RemoveMake/RemoveMake/g' /etc/paru.conf && \
    pacman -Qtdq | xargs -r pacman --noconfirm -Rcns && \
    rm -rf /home/devtainer/.cache && \
    rm -rf /build

USER devtainer
RUN sudo -u devtainer paru --noconfirm --skipreview --useask -S \
    bat \
    cargo \
    direnv \
    dua-cli \
    dust \
    fd

Final Thoughts #

There are other options out there, paru seemed to be the most supported at the time I started using arch and there has been no other reason for me to change it. It’s treated me well for nearly a year now.

useful btrfs tools

2023-03-22T17:31:39Z

disk usage #

Looking at disk usage on any of these must be done using a tool built for it if you want an accurate measurement. General purpose tools like du will be inaccurate as they do not count things like duplicate copies in snapshots.

❯ sudo btrfs fi usage -T /
[sudo] password for waylon:
Overall:
    Device size:                 465.26GiB
    Device allocated:            251.06GiB
    Device unallocated:          214.20GiB
    Device missing:                  0.00B
    Device slack:                    0.00B
    Used:                        234.44GiB
    Free (estimated):            227.37GiB      (min: 120.27GiB)
    Free (statfs, df):           227.37GiB
    Data ratio:                       1.00
    Metadata ratio:                   2.00
    Global reserve:              478.88MiB      (used: 0.00B)
    Multiple profiles:                  no

                  Data      Metadata System
Id Path           single    DUP      DUP      Unallocated Total     Slack
-- -------------- --------- -------- -------- ----------- --------- -----
 1 /dev/nvme1n1p2 239.00GiB 12.00GiB 64.00MiB   214.20GiB 465.26GiB     -
-- -------------- --------- -------- -------- ----------- --------- -----
   Total          239.00GiB  6.00GiB 32.00MiB   214.20GiB 465.26GiB 0.00B
   Used           225.82GiB  4.31GiB 64.00KiB

-T for tabular format

mounting the drive #

sudo mkdir /mnt/nvme1n1p2/
sudo mount -o subvol=/ /dev/nvme1n1p2 /mnt/nvme1n1p2

mounting a snapshot #

snapper #

btdu #

sudo btdu /mnt/nvme1n1p2

 btdu v0.5.0 @ /mnt/nvme1n1p2
--- / -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------  ~5.974 GiB [          ] /<DUP>  ~239.1 GiB [##########] /<SINGLE>

--- Details: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Full path: /mnt/nvme1n1p2/
- Average query duration: 0.0002558 seconds
- Represented size: ~245.0 GiB (607659 samples), ±0.0 B
- Logical offsets: ..., 2659587804610, 2608834997278, 2688762158568

--- Explanation:
Welcome to btdu. You are in the hierarchy root; results will be arranged according to
their block group and profile, and then by path.

Use the arrow keys to navigate, press ? for help.

 Samples: 607659  Resolution: ~422.8 KiB

btrfs-assistant #

Arch Linux Randomly Rejecting Passwords

2023-01-19T07:46:31Z

Fix Arch Linux randomly rejecting passwords with one command. Try ‘faillock –user $USER’ to reset login counter and regain access. Quick solution for a smooth computing"

If you’re an Arch Linux user, you may have experienced a frustrating issue where your password is randomly not being accepted by the system. This can be a major inconvenience and can cause a lot of frustration, especially if it happens frequently.

The good news is that there is a simple fix for this issue. The following bash code can be used to fix the problem:

bash faillock --user $USER

This command is used to reset the failed login count for the current user. By running this command, you will be able to reset the system’s login counter and regain access to your account.

It’s important to note that this command should only be used as a temporary solution. If you find yourself frequently having to run this command, it’s likely that there is a deeper issue with your system that needs to be addressed.

In any case, if you’re experiencing problems with your Arch Linux system not accepting your password, give the above command a try and see if it resolves the issue for you.

ssh copy id

2022-12-04T20:10:05Z

I recently setup some vm’s on my main machine and got sick of signing in with passwords.

ssh-keygen
ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub virt

ssh key permissions

2022-11-22T16:16:38Z

I just shared some ssh keys with myself and ran into this error telling me that I did not set the correct permissions on my key.

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@         WARNING: UNPROTECTED PRIVATE KEY FILE!          @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
Permissions 0750 for '/home/waylon/.ssh/id_*******' are too open.
It is required that your private key files are NOT accessible by others.
This private key will be ignored.
Load key "/home/waylon/.ssh/id_*******": bad Permissions
repo: Permission denied (publickey,gssapi-keyex,gssapi-with-mic).
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

Please make sure you have the correct access rights
and the repository exists.

I changed them with the following commands.

chmod 644 ~/.ssh/id_*******.pub
chmod 600 ~/.ssh/id_*******

obs virtual camera on boot

2022-10-18T08:34:25Z

For far too long I have had to fidget with v4l2oloopback after reboot. I’ve had this happen on ubuntu 18.04, 22.04, and arch.

After a reboot the start virtual camera button won’t work, It appears and is clickable, but never turns on. Until I run this command.

sudo modprobe v4l2loopback video_nr=10 card_label="OBS Video Source" exclusive_caps=1

Today I learned that you can turn on kernel modules through some files in /etc/modules...

This is what I did to my arch system to get it to work right after boot.

echo "v4l2loopback" | sudo tee /etc/modules-load.d/v4l2loopback.conf
echo "options v4l2loopback video_nr=10 card_label=\"OBS Video Source\" exclusive_caps=1" | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/v4l2loopback.conf

Setting up snapper on Arch

2022-09-05T11:00:46Z

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_97JOyC1o2o

snapper
snap-pac
grub-btrfs

Note #

These are mostly my notes to remind myself, I’d Highly reccomend watching this-video or reading this arch wiki page

/.snapshots already exists error #

When I started running sudo snapper -c root create-config / I ran into the following error.

Creating config failed (creating btrfs subvolume .snapshots failed since it already exists).

remove existing snapshots #

sudo umount /.snapshots
sudo rm -r /.snapshots

configure snapper #

sudo snapper -c root create-config /
sudo snapper -c home create-config /home

btrfs subvolumes #

sudo btrfs subvolume list /

sudo btrfs subvolume delete /.snapshots
sudo mkdir /.snapshots

#

# you might not see snapshots mounted yet
lsblk

# if you check fstab you will see an entry for it
cat /etc/fstab

# mount it
sudo mount -a

# now you should see /.snapshots mounted
lsblk

You should now see .snapshots in mountpoints.

Setting the default to @ #

so that you can boot into snapper snapshots

sudo btrfs subvol get-default /
sudo btrfs subvol list /

sudo btrfs subvol set-default 256 /
sudo btrfs subvol get-default /
## ID 256 gen 105268 top level 5 path @

snapper ls #

sudo snapper ls

leaving off for now

https://youtu.be/_97JOyC1o2o?t=909

config #

sudo nvim /etc/snapper/configs/root

ALLOW_GROUPS="wheel"

# limits for timeline cleanup
TIMELINE_MIN_AGE="1800"
TIMELINE_LIMIT_HOURLY="5"
TIMELINE_LIMIT_DAILY="7"
TIMELINE_LIMIT_WEEKLY="0"
TIMELINE_LIMIT_MONTHLY="0"
TIMELINE_LIMIT_YEARLY="0"

sudo chown -R :wheel /.snapshots/

The one reason I switched to arch

2022-07-23T12:05:55Z

The community, that’s it, end of post, roll the credits.

I’m a tinkerer #

I am a tinkerer, I am not going to run a stock desktop manager, mostly becuase that’s just not how my brain works. I need to tweak everything to fit my needs. Grantid I have not spent much time in many full fledged linux desktop environments. They are far more customizable than windows ever will be, I absolutely love that about them. Inevitibly I end up in a situation where I hit a wall, it just won’t do what I want it to do, or my lack of understanding what came wtih it holds me back.

minimal #

I love minimal installs. I love just building up my system from the bottom up with things that I like, I understand, and that I can script.

I’m a noob #

I spend a lot of my time in the terminal. I’d like to think I know how to use a linux command line for software development really well, but there are a lot of things that I still dont know all that well, mostly because I don’t need to.

aur">The AUR #

Arch’s community maintained repo

Now by far this is the thing that really kicked me over the edge and made arch feel like something that I needed to use. While on any Debian based distro it was inevitible that I would stumble accross a bug that was fixed in a newer version, not available in the standard repos, want new features that are not available in the standard repos, or want software that is not packaged into one of the standard repos.

This makes creating scripted installs/updates difficult. I have to pull releses from github, or some random website, or clone and build packages myself. It’s not too hard, but since I am the only one that maintains my personal install script it’s inevitible that something changes in the build process or release on something and breaks it over time.

PPA’s are not the same. Well maintained ppa’s are fine, but many of them are not. PPA’s are just deb files that someone hosts and their quality can be hit or miss depending on if the maintainer still uses it or not. While the AUR is not completely absent of stale packages it’s rolling release nature tends to keep them always up to date, and when it doesn’t the community helps out by flagging these packages in the AUR and upvoting maintained packages.

The Arch Wiki #

I have underutilized the arch wiki in the past, but dang it has some really good guides. For me (at my level) they edge on being to brief, generally I find wiki’s overly versose and hard to find what you are looking for. The arch wiki gives you what you need and no more. The articles and forum really have answered many of my questions and depened my understanding of linux.

I am learning #

While I am still a noob to a lot of this I am learning, and a combination of the minimal install with the arch wiki have really helped me learn a lot about lower level things like partitioning, grub, systemd, xorg. On most other systems these were just taken care of out of the box.

Arch is not hardcore #

I think there is an old sentimate that arch is for hardcore users only. Their typical install process really gatekeeps it this way, but there are other installers such as archinstall, which I used and now ships with the arch iso, that make it not much harder than any other distro.

If you are a tinkerer who likes to try different things, likes to set you machine up just the way you like it, and script it, arch really feels much easier to do this with. I’d even stand behind it being a distro for noob tinkerers.

Does distro matter?? #

Idk if it really matters all that much in the end, but the community behind the aur and arch wiki make setting up an up to date machine so much easier than on any lts based distro.

arch Fonts

2022-07-17T10:59:59Z

https://gist.github.com/YoEight/d19112db56cd8f93835bf2d009d617f7

Manage your displays with xrandr manager

2022-07-16T08:43:17Z

xrandr is a great cli to manage your windows in a linux distro using x11, which is most of them. The issue is that I can never remember all the flags to the command, and if you are using it with something like a laptop using a dock the names of all the displays tend to change every time you redock. This makes it really hard to make scripts that work right every time.

Homepage #

Check out the deresmos/xrandr-manager for more details on it.

installation #

xrander-manager is a python cli application that is simply a nice interface into xrandr. So you must have xrandr already installed, which is generally just there on any x11 window manager, I’ve never had to install it.

As with any python cli that is indended to be used as a global/system level cli application I always install them with pipx. This automates the process of creating a virtual environment for xrandr-manager for me, and does not clutter up my system packages with its dependencies that may eventually clash with another that I want to use.

# prereqs (xrandr, pipx)
pipx install xrandr-manager

set main monitor #

First if your main display is not set to the correct monitor set your main display first.

xrandr-manager -m HDMI-0
xrandr-manager -m DP-0

prompt mode #

If you dont know the name of your monitors and and don’t want to dig through xrandr, you can just run --prompt and tab complete to fill set your main display.

xrandr-manager --prompt

direction #

This is what I most often use xrandr-manager for. Once you have the main display set you can tell it where to put the other monitor. I’ve only tried this with two monitors, I have no idea what happens with more monitors.

xrandr-manager -d right
xrandr-manager -d left
xrandr-manager -d above
xrandr-manager -d below

mirror #

One thing that I always need to jump through hoops to do is mirror. Occasionally I want to mirror so that more people can see the screen while we are split screen gaming. This has seemed like a pain in any other xrandr utility, but trivial in xrandr-manager.

xrandr-manager --mirror

It logs out the xrandr command #

One nice thing about xrandr-manager is that it echos out the xrandr command that it’s running. This is nice because you can toss this behind a hotkey or an init script.

Guis #

Ya there are guis that do this. I’ve had good luck with arandr. It’s more intuitive to drag windows around like what you would do in windows. Every once in awhile it messes up and my polybar overlaps my windows, or my windows end up only on half the screen.

There are also graphics card specific utilities, Ive used nvidia x server settings and it mostly works similar to arandr.

qutebrowser clean up all status bars

2022-05-11T22:03:30Z

I really like the super clean look of no status menus, no url bar, no bookmarks bar, nothing. Don’t get me wrong these things are useful, but honestly they take up screen real estate and I RARELY look at them. What I really want is a toggle hotkey. I found this one from one of DT’s youtube video’s. I can now tap xx and both the status bar at the botton and the address bar at the top disappear.

# ~/.config/qutebrowser/config.py

config.bind("xb", "config-cycle statusbar.show always never")
config.bind("xt", "config-cycle tabs.show always never")
config.bind(
    "xx",
    "config-cycle statusbar.show always never;; config-cycle tabs.show always never",
)

A TTY Can Save Your Bacon

2022-04-08T13:46:25Z

I recently was unable to boot into my home Linux Desktop, it got stuck at diskcheck fsck. I found that I was able to get in to a tty through a hotkey.

https://twitter.com/_WaylonWalker/status/1512281106120384519

What’s a TTY? #

There’s probably more to it, but to me its a full screen terminal with zero gui, not even your gui fonts. It does log into your default shell so if you have a comfy command line setup it will be here for you even though it looks much different without fonts and full colorspace.

Normal setup #

Normally you have 6 TTY’s running, the first is dedicated to your desktop manager, which is your login screen it might be something like gdm or lightdm.

ctrl+alt+F1: login screen
ctrl+alt+F2: Desktop
ctrl+alt+F3: TTY 3
ctrl+alt+F4: TTY 4
ctrl+alt+F5: TTY 5
ctrl+alt+F6: TTY 6

In my case the desktop manager neverstarted, so ctrl+alt+F1 brought me into a tty.

What happened?? #

Well after getting back in and having some time to reflect, I think my Desktop manager was installed or just broken, possibly during a update I ran a few days prior.

I tried a bunch of things like switching to lightdm, and manually running startx.

Getting back in #

The final commands that ended up getting me back in were installing and starting gdm3.

sudo apt install gdm3
sudo systemctl start gdm3

Dunk is my new diff pager

2022-04-04T15:47:00Z

Dunk is a beautiful git diff tool built on top of rich.

Browsing through twitter the other day I discovered it through this tweet by _darrenburns.

https://twitter.com/_darrenburns/status/1510350016623394817

Dunk is beta #

Before I dive in deep, I do want to mention that Dunk is super new and beta at this point. I am making it my default pager, because I know what I am doing and can quickly shift back if I need to, no sweat. If you are a little less comfortable with the command line, terminal, or reading any issues that might come up, it might be best if you just pipe into Dunk when you want to use it.

The author really cautions the use of it as your default pager this early, I’m just showing that it’s possible, and I’m trying it.

He notes that it might have some issues especially with partially staged files.

try it #

You can try it with pipx.

git diff | pipx run dunk

install it #

If you like it, you can install it with pip or pipx, I prefer pipx for cli applications like this.

pipx install dunk

You can configure dunk as your default pager with the command line, or by editing your .gitconfig file.

git config --global pager.diff "dunk | less -R`

[pager]
    diff = dunk | less -R

As pointed out by _darrenburns dunk is not a pager and you can gain back all of the benefits of using a pager by piping into less with the -R flag.

reset it if you don’t like it #

You can --unset your pager configuration from the command line or edit your .gitconfig file by hand to remove the lines shown above.

git config --global --unset pager.diff

Comparison #

I have some edits to a game my son and I are working on unstaged so I ran git diff on that project with and without dunk to compare the differences.

Dunk just looks so good.

Always install #

If you follow along here often you know that I am a big fan of installing all my tools in an ansible playbook so that I don’t suffer configuring a new machine for months after getting it and wondering why its not exactly like the last.

# Dunk - prettier git diffs
# https://github.com/darrenburns/dunk
- name: check is dunk installed
  shell: command -v black
  register: dunk_exists
  ignore_errors: yes

- name: install dunk
  when: dunk_exists is failed
  shell: pipx install dunk

[[ ansible-install-if-not-callable ]]

More on conditionally installing tools with ansible in this post.

Unzip minecraft mods to their directory from the command line

2022-04-02T16:20:34Z

This morning I was trying to install a modpack on my minecraft server after getting a zip file, and its quite painful when I unzip everything in the current directory rather than the directory it belongs in.

I had the files on a Windows Machine #

So I’ve been struggling to get mods installed on linux lately and the easiest way to download the entire pack rather than each mod one by one seems to be to use the overwolf application on windows. Once I have the modpack I can start myself a small mod-server by zipping it, putting it in a mod-server directory and running a python http.server

python -m http.server

Downoading on the server #

Then I go back to my server and download the modpack with wget.

wget 10.0.0.171:8000/One%2BBlock%2BServer%2BPack-1.4.zip

Unzip to the minecraft-data directory #

Now I can unzip my mods into the minecraft-data directory.

unzip One+Block+Server+Pack-1.4.zip -d minecraft-data

Running the server with docker #

I run the minecraft server with docker, which is setup to mount the minecraft-data directory.

Running a Minecraft Server in Docker

A bit more on that in the other post, but when I download the whole modpack like this I make these changes to my docker compose. (commented out lines)

version: "3.8"

services:
  mc:
    container_name: walkercraft
    image: itzg/minecraft-server:java8
    environment:
      EULA: "TRUE"
      TYPE: "FORGE"
      VERSION: 1.15.2
      # MODS_FILE: /extras/mods.txt
      # REMOVE_OLD_MODS: "true"
    tty: true
    stdin_open: true
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - 25565:25565
    volumes:
      - ./minecraft-data:/data
      # - ./mods.txt:/extras/mods.txt:ro

volumes:
  data:

Create a Swapfile on Your Linux Machine

2022-03-18T13:29:49Z

If you ever end up on a linux machine that just does not have enough ram to suffice what you are doing and you just need to get the job done you can give it some more swap. You can look up reccomendations for how much swap you should have this is more about just trying to get your job done when you are almost there, but running out of memory on the hardware you have.

make the /swap file #

You can put this where you wish, for this example I am going to pop it into /swap

sudo fallocate -l 4G /swap
sudo chmod 600 /swap
sudo mkswap /swap
sudo swapon /swap

make sure that your swap is on #

You can make sure that your swap is working by using the free command, I like using the -h flag to get human readable numbers.

❯ free -h
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:            15Gi       5.5Gi       4.9Gi       458Mi       5.2Gi       9.3Gi
Swap:          4.0Gi          0B       4.0Gi

Reclaim memory usage in Jupyter

I also used this trick in this article to give my python process a bit more oompf and get it on home.

Install yq | A light weight yaml parser cli

2022-03-14T18:30:12Z

yq is a command line utility for parsing and querying yaml, like jq does for json.

This is for me #

I love that all of these modern tools built in go and rust, just give you a zipped up executable right from GitHub releases, but it’s not necessarily straight forward how to install them. yq does one of the best jobs I have seen, giving you instructions on how to get a specific version and install it.

I use a bunch of these tools, and for what its worth I trust the devs behind them to make sure they don’t break. This so far has worked out well for me, but if it ever doesn’t I can always pick an older version.

Just give me the latest #

Since I am all trusting of them I just want the latest version. I do not want to update a shell script with new versions, or even care about what then next version is, I just want it. Luckily you can script the release page for the latest version on all that I have came accross.

What is the latest #

I wrote or stole, I think I wrote it, this line of bash quite awhile ago, and it has served me well for finding the latest release for any GitHub project using releases. Just update it with the name of the tool, org, and repo and it works.

YQ_VERSION=$(curl --silent https://github.com/mikefarah/yq/releases/latest | tr -d '"' | sed 's/^.*tag\///g' | sed 's/>.*$//g' | sed 's/^v//')

Install with your shell #

Now that we know how to consistently get the right version, I generally right click the release in the releases page, replace the version with ${TOOL_VERSION} and put it in this wget call, then move the binary over to ~/.local/bin

local tmp=`mktemp -dt install-XXXXXX`
pushd $tmp
YQ_VERSION=$(curl --silent https://github.com/mikefarah/yq/releases/latest | tr -d '"' | sed 's/^.*tag\///g' | sed 's/>.*$//g' | sed 's/^v//')
wget https://github.com/mikefarah/yq/releases/download/v${YQ_VERSION}/yq_linux_amd64.tar.gz -O- -q | tar -zxf - -C /tmp
cp yq_linux_amd64 ~/.local/bin/yq
popd

Install with ansible #

Now I don’t want to worry about missing yq again, so I am added it to my ansible install script. This way it’s installed everyt time I setup a new system with all of my favorite cli’s.

- name: check is yq installed
  shell: command -v yq
  register: yq_exists
  ignore_errors: yes
  tags:
    - yq

- name: Install yq
  when: yq_exists is failed
  shell: |
    local tmp=`mktemp -dt install-XXXXXX`
    pushd $tmp
    YQ_VERSION=$(curl --silent https://github.com/mikefarah/yq/releases/latest | tr -d '"' | sed 's/^.*tag\///g' | sed 's/>.*$//g' | sed 's/^v//')
    wget https://github.com/mikefarah/yq/releases/download/v${YQ_VERSION}/yq_linux_amd64.tar.gz -O- -q | tar -zxf - -C /tmp
    cp yq_linux_amd64 {{ lookup('env', 'HOME') }}/.local/bin/yq
    popd
  tags:
    - yq

Links #

This is how I installed it, of course you can always follow Mike’s instructions from the repo.

Git Worktrees are not so Scary

2022-03-10T19:19:34Z

So worktrees, I always thought they were a big scary things. Turns out they are much simpler than I thought.

Myth #1 #

no special setup

I thought you had to be all in or worktrees or normal git, but not both. When I see folks go all in on worktrees they start with a bare repo, while its true this is the way you go all in, its not true that this is required.

Lets make a worktree #

Making a worktree is as easy as making a branch. It’s actually just a branch that lives in another place in your filesystem.

# checkout a new worktree called compare based on main in /tmp/project
git worktree add -b compare /tmp/project main

# checkout a new worktree called compare based on HEAD in /tmp/project
git worktree add -b compare /tmp/project

# checkout a worktree from an existing feature branch in /tmp/project
git worktree add /tmp/project my-existing-feature-branch

The worktree that you create is considered a linked worktree, while the original worktree is called the main worktree

Note that I put this in my tmp directory because I don’t expect it to live very long, my recent use case was to compare two files after a big formatting change. You put these where you want, but dont come at me when your /tmp gets wiped and you loose work.

Myth #2 #

they are hidden mysterious creatures

Just like branches git has some nice commands to help us understand what worktrees we have on our system. Firstly we have something very specific to worktrees to list them out.

git worktree list

gives the output

/home/u_walkews/git/git-work-play  b202442 [main]
/tmp/another                       d9b2cf1 [another]

Even the branch command gives a bit different output for a worktree.

git branch

gives this output, notice the + denotes an actively linked worktree, and the * gives the active branch. If you cd over to the worktree directory, these will switch roles.

+ another
  just-a-branch
* main

You can only checkout a branch in one place #

If you try to checkout a branch that is checked out in a linked worktree, you will be presented with an error, and it will not let you check out a second copy of that branch.

❯ git checkout another
fatal: 'another' is already checked out at '/tmp/another'

Myth #3 #

once you go worktree, you worktree

Once you have worktrees on your system, you have a few ways to get rid of them. Using git’s way feels much superior, but if your a doof like me and didn’t read the manual before you rm /tmp/another -rf you will notice that the worktree is still active. If you run git worktree prune it will clean that right up.

git worktree remove another

rm /tmp/another
git worktree prune

It won’t let you remove if you have changes #

This makes me think that remove is a much safer option. If you have uncommitted changes, git worktree remove will throw an error, and make you commit or use --force to remove the worktree.

❯ git worktree remove another
fatal: 'another' contains modified or untracked files, use --force to delete it

RTFM #

read the friendly manual

There is a ton more information in the man page for worktrees, these are just the parts that seemed really useful to me out of the gate.

man git worktree

Setup SSH from chromebook to home desktop

2022-03-08T14:20:52Z

I write many of these posts from a 10 year old desktop that sits in my office these days. It does a very fine job running all of the things I need it to for my side work, but sometimes I want a mobile setup. I don’t really want to spend the $$ on a new laptop just for the few times I want to be somewhere else in the house. What I do have though is a chromebook.

I’ve tried to get the chromebook into my workflow in the past, but have failed. Much because by the time I got all of my tools up and running in the linux vm it was taking up quite a bit of space on the device and made it harder for others to use as a chromebook.

Today I am giving it a second try, but this time with ssh.

Checking for existing sshd #

Before doing anything I checked to see if sshd is already running. Using the following command.

sudo service ssh status
# or
pgrep -l sshd

Both returned nothing so I know that its not running.

setting up sshd #

just apt install it

Next install the openssh-client and openssh-server

sudo apt install openssh-client -y
sudo apt install openssh-server -y

After this I can see that its now running by checking its status once again.

sudo service ssh status

Gives me the result.

● ssh.service - OpenBSD Secure Shell server
     Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/ssh.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
     Active: active (running) since Tue 2022-03-08 08:17:05 CST; 12min ago
       Docs: man:sshd(8)
             man:sshd_config(5)
    Process: 181185 ExecStartPre=/usr/sbin/sshd -t (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
   Main PID: 181189 (sshd)
      Tasks: 1 (limit: 19119)
     Memory: 2.8M
        CPU: 96ms
     CGroup: /system.slice/ssh.service
             └─181189 sshd: /usr/sbin/sshd -D [listener] 0 of 10-100 startups

Accessing the desktop #

I have already enabled the Linux terminal on my chromebook, so I just opened the terminal, and ran the following.

ssh <username>@<ip-address>

It prompted for my password and I was in. I had all of my vim, tmux, and zsh comforts that I enjoy without installing anything. It worked so well that this whole post was written from my chromebook.

Limitations #

This does limit me to being on the same network as my desktop, which these days is almost always true.

ssh keys #

Out of the box I am just using passwords to get in, but if this were public I would lock down to requiring an ssh key to enter. I’ll likey do this in a future post.

Dedupe your shell paths

2022-03-04T19:08:49Z

If you have ever ran which <command> and see duplicate entries it’s likely that you have duplicate entries in your $PATH. You can clean this up with a one liner at the end of your bashrc or zshrc.

eval "typeset -U path"

Bash mktemp

2022-03-02T14:52:08Z

There is GNU coreutils command called mktemp that is super handy in shell scripts to make temporary landing spots for files so that they never clash with another instance, and will automatically get cleaned up when you restart, or whenever /tmp gets wiped. I’m not sure when that is, but I don’t expect it to be long.

Making temp directories #

Here are some examples of making temp directories in different places, my favorite is mktemp -dt mytemp-XXXXXX.

# makes a temporary directory in /tmp/ with the defaul template tmp.XXXXXXXXXX
mktemp

# makes a temporary directory in your current directory
mktemp --directory mytemp-XXXXXX
# shorter version
mktemp -d mytemp-XXXXXX

# same thing, but makes a file
mktemp mytemp-XXXXXX

# makes a temporary directory in your /tmp/ directory (or what ever you have configured as your TMPDIR)
mktemp --directory --tmpdir mytemp-XXXXXX
# shorter version
mktemp -dt mytemp-XXXXXX

# same thing, but makes a file
mktemp --tmpdir mytemp-XXXXXX
# shorter version
mktemp -t mytemp-XXXXXX

Use Case #

Here is a sample script that shows how to capture the tempdir as a variable and reuse it. Here is an example of curling my bootstrap file into a temp directory and running it from that directory.

local tmp=`mktemp -dt bootstrap-XXXXXX`
pushd $tmp
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/WaylonWalker/devtainer/main/bootstrap > bootstrap
bash bootstrap
popd

Templates #

You must have at least 3 trailing X’s that mktemp will replace with random characters. I played with it for a bit, it kinda allows for some trailing characters, and will not fill groups of X’s earlier in your template, only the last consecutive string.

My randomm samples I played with.

waylonwalker.com on  main [!?]  v3.9.7 (waylonwalker.com) took 2m24s
❯ mktemp myXtemp-XaXbXXXX -dt
/tmp/myXtemp-XaXbx9hn

waylonwalker.com on  main [!?]  v3.9.7 (waylonwalker.com)
❯ mktemp myXtemp-XaXbXXXXs -dt
/tmp/myXtemp-XaXb2tpGs

waylonwalker.com on  main [!?]  v3.9.7 (waylonwalker.com)
❯ mktemp myXtemp-XaXbXXcXXs -dt
mktemp: too few X's in template ‘myXtemp-XaXbXXcXXs’

waylonwalker.com on  main [!?]  v3.9.7 (waylonwalker.com)
❯ mktemp myXtemp-XaXbXXcXXs -dt

waylonwalker.com on  main [!?]  v3.9.7 (waylonwalker.com)
❯ mktemp myXtemp-XaXbXXXXt -dt
/tmp/myXtemp-XaXbe8PWt

waylonwalker.com on  main [!?]  v3.9.7 (waylonwalker.com)
❯ mktemp myXtemp-XXX-you-XXX -dt
/tmp/myXtemp-XXX-you-48l

waylonwalker.com on  main [!?]  v3.9.7 (waylonwalker.com)
❯ mktemp myXtemp-XXX-you-XX -dt
mktemp: too few X's in template ‘myXtemp-XXX-you-XX’

RTFM #

The man page has good stuff on all the flags that you might need.

man mktemp

Recover a lost git branch with checkout

2022-03-01T14:34:01Z

Once you give a branch the big D (git branch -D mybranch) its gone, its lost from your history. It’s completely removed from your log. There will be no reference to these commits, or will there?

TLDR #

Checkout is your savior, all you need is the commit hash.

Immediate Regret #

your terminal is still open

We have all done this, you give branch the big D only to realize it was the wrong one. Don’t worry, not all is lost, this is the easiest to recover from. When you run the delete command you will see something like this.

❯ git branch -D new
Deleted branch new (was bc02a64).

Notice the hash is right there is the hash of your commit. You can use that to get your content back.

git checkout -b bc02a64
git branch new

# or in one swoop checkout your new branch at the `start-point` you want
git checkout -b new bc02a64

Delayed reaction #

you have closed your terminal

If you have closed your terminal, or have deleted with a gui or something that does not tell you the hash as you run it, don’t fret, all your work is still there (as long as you have commited). You just have to dig it out. The reflog contains a list of all git operations that have occurred on your git repo, and can be incredibly helpful with this.

Kinda Recent #

If your botched delete operation was recent just diving right into the reflog will show it.

❯ git reflog
03a3338 (main) HEAD@{0}: checkout: moving from new to main
bc02a64 (HEAD -> another, new) HEAD@{4}: commit: newfile
03a3338 (main) HEAD@{2}: checkout: moving from main to new

In this example, I checked out a branch called new, commited a new file, then switched back to main and deleted new.

Now That I have the commit hash I can use the same solution to get my branch back.

git checkout -b bc02a64
git branch new

# or in one swoop checkout your new branch at the `start-point` you want
git checkout -b new bc02a64

A lot has happened since then #

If a lot has happened since then, you are going to need to pull out some more tool to sift through that reflog, especially if its a big one. The first suggestion that I have is to pipe into grep and look for commit messages, or the name of the branch.

❯ git reflog | grep "moving from"
03a3338 HEAD@{1}: checkout: moving from main to branch/oops
03a3338 HEAD@{2}: checkout: moving from oops to main
03a3338 HEAD@{4}: checkout: moving from main to oops
03a3338 HEAD@{5}: checkout: moving from another to main
bc02a64 HEAD@{6}: checkout: moving from main to another
03a3338 HEAD@{7}: checkout: moving from another to main
bc02a64 HEAD@{8}: checkout: moving from new to another
bc02a64 HEAD@{9}: checkout: moving from bc02a64bbe5683d905e333e8dfcbbb91a5e77549 to new
bc02a64 HEAD@{10}: checkout: moving from main to bc02a64bbe56
03a3338 HEAD@{11}: checkout: moving from new to main
03a3338 HEAD@{13}: checkout: moving from main to new
03a3338 HEAD@{14}: checkout: moving from other to main
03a3338 HEAD@{18}: checkout: moving from main to other

git has a built in --grep flag, but I don’t think there is a way to filter by branch name, regardless it still is helpful.

❯ git reflog --grep new
bc02a64 (HEAD -> another, new) HEAD@{4}: commit: newfile

Maybe if you can remember a filename you can pass in -- <filename>.

git reflog -- readme.md

RTFM #

There are many other ways to slice up a git log, and reflog alike. check out man git log for some more flags.

Install obs flatpak

2022-02-25T02:33:16Z

Big announcement recently that obs studio now builds out to a flatpak, hopefully making it easier for all of us to install, especially us near normies that don’t regularly compile anything from source.

install flatpak #

I did not have flatpak installed so the first thing I had to do was get the flatpak command installed, and add their default repo.

sudo apt install flatpak
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

Once I had flatpak, I was able to get obs installed with the following command.

flatpak install flathub com.obsproject.Studio

Once Installed it fired right up for me with the next command they suggested.

flatpak run com.obsproject.Studio

It Works #

Pretty straightforward, following the instructions given it all worked for me, but it was missing a lot of the plugins that the current snap package I am using gives me (namely virtual webcam). So I am not ready to jump onto it until I figure out how to manage my own obs plugins. For now I think the snap is working just well enough.

Links #

Vim remaps use cmd in place of :

2022-02-14T14:53:17Z

Anyone just starting out their vim customization journey is bound to run into this error.

E5520: <Cmd> mapping must end with <CR>

I did not get it #

I’ll admit, in hindsight it’s very clear what this is trying to tell me, but for whatever reason I still did not understand it and I just used a : everywhere.

From the docs #

If you run :h <cmd> you will see a lot of reasons why you should do it, from performance, to hygene, to ergonomics. You will also see another clear statement about how to use <cmd>.

                                                          E5520
  <Cmd> commands must terminate, that is, they must be followed by <CR> in the
  {rhs} of the mapping definition.  Command-line mode is never entered.

When to map with a : #

You still need to map your remaps with a : if you do not close it with a <cr>. This might be something like prefilling a command with a search term.

nnoremap <leader><leader>f :s/search/

Otherwise use #

If you can close the <cmd> with a <cr> the command do so. Your map will automatically be silent, more ergonomic, performant, and all that good stuff.

nnoremap <leader><leader>f <cmd>s/search/Search/g<cr>

Bluetooth at the command line on Ubuntu

2022-02-11T22:01:41Z

One thing about moving to a tiling window manager like awesome wm or i3 is that they are so lightweight they are all missing things like bluetooth gui’s out of the box, and you generally bring your own. Today I just needed to connet a new set of headphones, so I decided to just give the bluetoothctl cli a try. It seems to come with Ubuntu, I don’t think I did anything to get it.

bluetoothctl

Running bluetoothctl pops you into a repl/shell like bah, python, or ipython. From here you can execute bluetoothctl commands.

Here is what I had to do to connect my headphones.

# list out the commands available
help

# scan for new devices and stop when you see your device show up
scan on
scan off

# list devices
devices
paired-devices

# pair the device
pair XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX

# now your device should show up in the paired list
paired-devices

# connet the device
connect XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX

help #

Here is the output of the help menu on my machine, it seems pretty straight forward to block, and remove devices from here.

note ctrl revers to the bluetooth controller on the machine you are on, and dev refers to a device id.

Menu main:
Available commands:
-------------------
advertise                                         Advertise Options Submenu
scan                                              Scan Options Submenu
gatt                                              Generic Attribute Submenu
list                                              List available controllers
show [ctrl]                                       Controller information
select <ctrl>                                     Select default controller
devices                                           List available devices
paired-devices                                    List paired devices
system-alias <name>                               Set controller alias
reset-alias                                       Reset controller alias
power <on/off>                                    Set controller power
pairable <on/off>                                 Set controller pairable mode
discoverable <on/off>                             Set controller discoverable mode
agent <on/off/capability>                         Enable/disable agent with given capability
default-agent                                     Set agent as the default one
advertise <on/off/type>                           Enable/disable advertising with given type
set-alias <alias>                                 Set device alias
scan <on/off>                                     Scan for devices
info [dev]                                        Device information
pair [dev]                                        Pair with device
trust [dev]                                       Trust device
untrust [dev]                                     Untrust device
block [dev]                                       Block device
unblock [dev]                                     Unblock device
remove <dev>                                      Remove device
connect <dev>                                     Connect device
disconnect [dev]                                  Disconnect device
menu <name>                                       Select submenu
version                                           Display version
quit                                              Quit program
exit                                              Quit program
help                                              Display help about this program

Final Impressions #

This was something that I have never used, and thought it would be intimidating but it worked great first try out of the box. It could have been my device on the other end, but this was one of the least frustrations I have had pairing a new device.

Simple Samba Share Setup

2022-02-09T14:41:20Z

Samba is an implementation of the smb protocol that allows me to setup network shares on my linux machine that I can open on a variety of devices.

I think the homelab is starting to intrigue me enought to dive into the path of experimenting with different things that I might want setup in my own home. One key piece of this is network storage. As I looked into nas, I realized that it takes a dedicated machine, or one virtualized at a lower level than I have capability for right now.

Humble Beginnings #

To get goind I am going to make a directory /srv/samba/public open to anyone on my network. I am not going to worry too much about it, I just want something up and running so that I can learn.

Install samba, open the firewall, and edit the smb.conf

sudo apt install samba samba-common-bin
sudo ufw allow samba
sudo nvim /etc/samba/smb.conf

I added this to the end of my smb.conf

[public]

comment = public share, no need to enter username and password
path = /srv/samba/public/
browseable = yes
writable = yes
guest ok = yes

Then I made the /srv/samba/public directory and made it writable by anyone.

sudo mkdir -p /srv/samba/public
sudo setfacl -R -m "u:nobody:rwx" /srv/samba/public/

Windows, yes windows #

I have a windows desktop in my office, primarily for my wife to run premiere pro, and my son to play Minecraft. I walked over to it, opened the file explorer, and ernt to \\<my-local-ip>. It asked for the username and password, I typed in the username and password of the linux device I have the share running on, and I was in. Right there I could see the Public folder. I opened it and made a files successfully.

ag silver searcher look ahead and look behind

2022-02-08T13:54:08Z

A super useful tool when doing PR’s or checking your own work during a big refactor is the silver searcher. Its a super fast command line based searching tool. You just run ag "<search term>" to search for your search term. This will list out every line of every file in any directory under your current working directory that contains a match.

Ahead/Behind #

It’s often useful to need some extra context around the change. I recently reviewed a bunch of PR’s that moved schema from save_args to the root of the dataset in all yaml configs. To ensure they all made it to the top level DataSet configuraion, and not underneath save_args. I can do a search for all the schemas, and ensure that none of them are under save_args anymore.

ag "schema: " -A 12 -B 12

Installing Rust and Cargo on Ubuntu 21.10 using Ansible

2022-02-06T15:34:02Z

Installing rust in your own ansible playbook will make sure that you can get consistent installs accross all the machines you may use, or replicate your development machine if it ever goes down.

Personal philosophy #

I try to install everything that I will want to use for more than just a trial inside of my ansible playbook. This way I always get the same setup across my work and home machines, and anytime I might setup a throw away vm.

reccommended install #

This is how rust reccomends that you install it on Ubuntu. First update your system, then run their installer, and finally check that the install was successful.

# system update
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

# download and run the rust installer
curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh

# confirm your installation is successful
rustc --version

Ansible Install #

The first thing I do in my playbooks is to check if the tool is already installed. Here I chose to look for cargo, you could also look for rustc.

  - name: check if cargo is installed
    shell: command -v cargo
    register: cargo_exists
    ignore_errors: yes

I first check for an existing install so I can re-run my playbooks quickly filling in only missing tools. More on this ansible install conditionally

Next we need to download the installer script and make it executable.

  - name: Download Installer
    when: cargo_exists is failed
    get_url:
      url: https://sh.rustup.rs
      dest: /tmp/sh.rustup.rs
      mode: '0755'
      force: 'yes'
    tags:
      - rust

I chose to download the installer, because I was unable to pass in the -y flag otherwise, which is required to do unattended installs.

Last we just run the installer given to us by rust with the -y flag so that it will run unattended.


  - name: install rust/cargo
    when: cargo_exists is failed
    shell: /tmp/sh.rustup.rs -y
    tags:
      - rust

One more thing #

Make sure that you source your cargo env, otherwise your shell will not find rustc or cargo. I chose to do this by adding the following line to my ~/.zshrc. You can but it in ~/.bashrc if that is your thing, or just run it in your shell to just get it to work.

[ -f ~/.cargo/env ] && source $HOME/.cargo/env

Full Install Playbook #

Here is a fully working install playbook to get you started or to port into your own playbook.

- hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: true
  become: true
  become_user: "{{ lookup('env', 'USER') }}"

  pre_tasks:
    - name: update repositories
      apt: update_cache=yes
      become_user: root
      changed_when: False
  vars:
    user: "{{ ansible_user_id }}"
  tasks:
  - name: check if cargo is installed
    shell: command -v cargo
    register: cargo_exists
    ignore_errors: yes

  - name: Download Installer
    when: cargo_exists is failed
    get_url:
      url: https://sh.rustup.rs
      dest: /tmp/sh.rustup.rs
      mode: '0755'
      force: 'yes'
    tags:
      - rust

  - name: install rust/cargo
    when: cargo_exists is failed
    shell: /tmp/sh.rustup.rs -y
    tags:
      - rust

You can save this as a local.yml and run the following in your shell to run the playbook on your local machine.

ansible-playbook local.yml --ask-become-pass

note: --ask-become-pass is required for the system update step. This will ask for your password as soon as ansible starts.

I also have a very similar article on hwo I ansible install fonts

Neovim Config for Git

2022-02-04T14:23:57Z

Creating a minimal config specifically for git commits has made running git commit much more pleasant. It starts up Much faster, and has all of the parts of my config that I use while making a git commit. The one thing that I often use is autocomplete, for things coming from elsewhere in the tmux session. For this cmpe-tmux specifically is super helpful.

The other thing that is engrained into my muscle memory is jj for escape. For that I went agead and added my settings and keymap with no noticable performance hit.

Here is the config that has taken

~/.config/nvim/init-git.vim

source ~/.config/nvim/settings.vim
source ~/.config/nvim/keymap.vim
source ~/.config/nvim/git-plugins.vim
lua require'waylonwalker.cmp'

~/.config/nvim/git-plugins.vim

call plug#begin('~/.local/share/nvim/plugged')

" cmp
Plug 'hrsh7th/nvim-cmp'
Plug 'hrsh7th/cmp-nvim-lsp'
Plug 'hrsh7th/cmp-buffer'
Plug 'hrsh7th/cmp-path'
Plug 'hrsh7th/cmp-calc'
Plug 'andersevenrud/compe-tmux', { 'branch': 'cmp' }


call plug#end()

~/.gitconfig

[core]
    editor = nvim -u ~/.config/nvim/init-git.vim

How to Properly Simulate Stow

2022-01-30T20:28:17Z

stow -R --simulate -vvv git

Tmux and Vim Clipboard for Ubuntu

2022-01-26T02:50:56Z

One of the first things I noticed broken in my terminal based workflow moving from Windows wsl to ubuntu was that my clipboard was all messed up and not working with my terminal apps. Luckily setting tmux and neovim to work with the system clipboard was much easier than it was on windows.

First off you need to get xclip if you don’t already have it provided by your distro. I found it in the apt repositories. I have used it between Ubuntu 18.04 and 21.10 and they all work flawlessly for me.

I have tmux setup to automatically copy any selection I make to the clipboard by setting the following in my ~/.tmux.conf. While I have neovim open I need to be in insert mode for this to pick up.

# ~/tmux.conf
bind -T copy-mode-vi Enter send-keys -X copy-pipe-and-cancel "xclip -i -f -selection primary | xclip -i -selection clipboard"
bind-key -T copy-mode-vi MouseDragEnd1Pane send-keys -X copy-pipe-and-cancel "xclip -selection clipboard -i"

To get my yanks to go to the system clipboard in neovim, I just added unnamedplus to my existing clipboard variable.

# ~/.config/nvim/init.vim
set clipboard+=unnamedplus

If you need to copy something right from the terminal you can use xclip directly. I do this semi-often to send someone a message in chat.

cat file.txt | clip -sel copy

I set up some alias’s for doing this a bit more efficiently, but don’t find myself using them very often. This helps me grab commands from history and copy them.

alias hclip="history | tail -n1 | cut -c 8- | xclip -sel clip"
alias fclip="history -n 1000 | fzf | cut -c 8- | xclip -sel clip"
alias fclip="history -n 1000 | fzf | xclip -sel clip"

Tmux hotkey for copier templates

2022-01-24T02:22:53Z

I have added a hotkey to my copier template setup to quickly access all my templates at any time from tmux. At any point I can hit <c-b><c-b>, thats holding control and hitting bb, and I will get a popup list of all of my templates directory names. Its an fzf list, which means that I can fuzzy search through it for the template I want, or arrow key to the one I want if I am feeling insane. I even setup it up so that the preview is a list of the files that come with the template in tree view.

bind-key c-b popup -E -w 80% -d '#{pane_current_path}' "\
    pipx run copier copy ~/.copier-templates/`ls ~/.copier-templates |\
    fzf --header $(pwd) --preview='tree ~/.copier-templates/{} |\
    lolcat'` . \
    "

I’ve had this on my systems for a few weeks now and I am constantly using it for my tils, blogs, and my .envrc file that goes into all of my projects to make sure that I have a virtual environment installed and running any time I open it.

Copier Tasks | Python templating post run task

2022-01-22T04:49:12Z

Copier allows you to run post render tasks, just like cookiecutter. These are defined as a list of tasks in your copier.yml. They are simply shell commands to run.

The example I have below runs an update-gratitude bash script after the copier template has been rendered.

# copier.yml
num: 128
_answers_file: .gratitude-copier-answers.yml
_tasks:
  - "update-gratitude"

I have put the script in ~/.local/bin so that I know it’s always on my $PATH. It will reach back into the copier.yml and update the default number.

#!/bin/bash
# ~/.local/bin/update-gratitude
current=`awk '{print $2}' ~/.copier-templates/gratitude/copier.yml | head -n 1`
new=`expr $current + 1`
echo $current
echo $new
sed -i "s/$current/$new/g" ~/.copier-templates/gratitude/copier.yml

fuzzy wallpaper with fzf

2022-01-19T01:17:26Z

I really appreciate that in linux anything can be scripted, including setting the wallpaper. So everytime I disconnect a monitor I can just rerun my script and fix my wallpaper without digging deep into the ui and fussing through a bunch of settings.

feh --bg-scale ~/.config/awesome/wallpaper/my_wallpaper.png

I set my default wallpaper with feh using the command above.

Leaning in on feh, we can use fzf to pick a wallpaper from a directory full of wallpapers with very few keystrokes.

alias wallpaper='ls ~/.config/awesome/wallpaper | fzf --preview="feh --bg-scale ~/.config/awesome/wallpaper/{}" | xargs -I {} feh --bg-scale ~/.config/awesome/wallpaper/{}'

I have mine alias’d to wallpaper so that I can quickly run it from my terminal.

Converting markdown to pdf with pandoc on linux

2022-01-12T03:25:36Z

Converting markdown posts to pdf on ubuntu takes a few packages from the standard repos. I had to go through a few stack overflow posts, and nothing seemed to have all the fonts and packages that I needed to convert markdown, but this is what ended up working for me.

Installing all the packages #

sudo apt install \
  pandoc \
  texlive-latex-base \
  texlive-fonts-recommended \
  texlive-extra-utils \
  texlive-latex-extra \
  texlive-xetex

Using pandoc to convert markdown to a pdf #

# older versions of pandoc, I needed this one on ubuntu 18.04
pandoc pages/til/convert-markdown-pdf-linux.md -o convert-markdown-pdf.pdf --latex-engine=xelatex
# newer versions of pandoc, I needed this one on ubuntu 21.04
pandoc pages/til/convert-markdown-pdf-linux.md -o convert-markdown-pdf.pdf --pdf-engine=xelatex

Here is an image of what converting this article over to a pdf looks like. The raw markdown is here.

Installing Pipx on Ubuntu

2022-01-10T23:14:05Z

I recently paired up with another dev running windows with Ubuntu running in wsl, and we had a bit of a stuggle to get our project off the ground because they were missing com system dependencies to get going.

Straight in the terminal #

Open up a terminal and get your required system dependencies using the apt package manager and the standard ubuntu repos.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install \
      python3-dev \
      python3-pip \
      python3-venv \
      python3-virtualenv
pip install pipx

Using an Ansible-Playbook #

I like running things like this through an ansible-playbook as it give me some extra control and repeatability next time I have a new machine to setup.

- hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: true
  become: true
  become_user: "{{ lookup('env', 'USER') }}"

  pre_tasks:
    - name: update repositories
      apt: update_cache=yes
      become_user: root
      changed_when: False
  vars:
    user: "{{ ansible_user_id }}"
  tasks:
    - name: Install System Packages 1 (terminal)
      become_user: root
      apt:
        name:
          - build-essential
          - python3-dev
          - python3-pip
          - python3-venv
          - python3-virtualenv
    - name: check is pipx installed
      shell: command -v pipx
      register: pipx_exists
      ignore_errors: yes

    - name: pipx
      when: pipx_exists is failed
      pip:
        name: pipx
      tags:
        - pipx

video clip #

Here is a clip of me getting pipx running on ubuntu 21.10, and running a few of my favorite pipx commands.

2 minutes to stow

2022-01-09T00:33:58Z

Stow is an incredible way to manage your dotfiles. It works by managing symlinks between your dotfiles directory and the rest of the system. You can then make your dotfiles directory a git repo and have it version controlled. In my honest opinion, when I was trying to get started the docs straight into deep detail of things I frankly don’t really care about and jumped right over how to use it.

When using stow its easiest to keep your dotfiles directory (you may name it what you want) in your home directory, with application directories inside of it.

Then each application directory should reflet the same diretory structure as you want in your home directory.

zsh #

Here is a simple example with my zshrc.

mkdir ~/dotfiles
cd ~/dotfiles
mkdir zsh
mv ~/.zshrc zsh
stow --simulate zsh

You can pass in the –simulate if you wish, it will tell you if there are going to be any more errors or not, but it wont give much more than that.

WARNING: in simulation mode so not modifying filesystem.

Once your ready you can stow your zsh application.

stow zsh

nvim #

A slightly more complicated example is neovim since its diretory structure does not put configuration files directly in your home directory, but rather at a deeper level.

mkdir ~/dotfiles/nvim/.config/nvim/ -p
cd ~/dotfiles
mv ~/.config/nvim/ ~/dotfiles/nvim/.config/nvim/
stow zsh

!notice how the nvim directory inside of dotfiles is structured like it would be in your $HOME directory.

Using Copier Answers to rerun templates quickly

2022-01-08T01:16:52Z

The copier answers file is a key component to making your templates re-runnable. Let’s look at the example for my setup.py.

❯ tree ~/.copier-templates/setup.py
/home/walkers/.copier-templates/setup.py
├── [[ _copier_conf.answers_file ]].tmpl
├── copier.yml
├── setup.cfg
└── setup.py.tmpl

0 directories, 4 files

Inside of my [[ _copier_conf.answers_file ]].tmpl file is this, a message not to muck around with it, and the ansers in yaml form. The first line is just a helper for the blog post.

# ~/.copier-templates/setup.py/\[\[\ _copier_conf.answers_file\ \]\].tmpl
# Changes here will be overwritten by Copier; NEVER EDIT MANUALLY
[[_copier_answers|to_nice_yaml]]

Inside my copier.yml I have setup my _answers_file to point to a special file. This is because this is not a whole projet template, but one just for a single file.

# copier.yml
# ...
_answers_file: .setup-py-copier-answers.yml

Once I change the _answers_file I was incredibly stuck

Run it #

I’m making a library of personal copier templates in my ~/.copier-templates directory and I am going to run it from there.

copier copy ~/.copier-templates/setup.py

Results #

After rendering the template we have the following content in our .setup.setup-py-copier-answers.yml file. This will allow us to update quick if we ever change our template.

# .setup-py-copier-answers.yml
# Changes here will be overwritten by Copier; NEVER EDIT MANUALLY
_src_path: /home/walkers/.copier-templates/setup.py
author_github: waylonwalker
author_name: Waylon Walker
description: awesomeness
framework: null
keywords: null
package_name: my-package

Update it #

This is where I was most stuck, primarily becuase -a <answers_file> must come exactly after the base command copier. This felt a bit odd to and not where I expected it so it.

copier -a .setup-py-copier-answers.yml update

Stop asking all these damn questions #

So the defaults are now changed to our previous results, but it keeps asking for them. To stop asking we can simply add a -f flag.

copier -fa .setup-py-copier-answers.yml update

pipx examples

2022-01-07T03:04:57Z

count lines of code #

pipx run pygount markata
pipx run pygount markata --format=summary
pipx run pygount markata --suffix=cfg,py,yml

Remove Vim Tab Characters

2022-01-06T01:49:31Z

I’ve been stuck many times looking at a vim buffer with little question marks at the beginning of each line and trying to get rid of them. for so long I didn’t know what they were so trying to get rid of them was impossible.

It turns out they are tabs, and you can get rid of the little leading question marks with this substitution command.

:%s/\t/    /g

Tmux Pop size

2022-01-05T17:37:26Z

tmux popups can be sized how you like based on the % width of the terminal on creation by using the flags (h, w, x, y) for height, width, and position.

# normal popup
tmux popup figlet "Hello"
# fullscreen popup
tmux popup -h 100% -w 100% figlet "Hello"
# 75% centered popup
tmux popup -h 100% -w 75% figlet "Hello"
# 75% popup on left side
tmux popup -h 100% -w 75% -x 0% figlet "Hello"

Sorry, your browser doesn't support embedded videos.

example running these commands

Copier Templates

2022-01-05T01:54:07Z

%%include til/copier_endops

%%include til/copier-template-variables

%%include til/copier-answers

List all the files containing a phrase

2021-12-31T20:24:48Z

One of the most useful skills you can acquire to make you faster at almost any job that uses a computer is getting good at finding text in your current working diretory and identifying the files that its in. I often use the silver searcher ag or ripgrep rg to find files in large directories quickly. Both have a sane set of defaults that ignore hidden and gitignored files, but getting them to list only the filenames and not the matched was not trivial to me.

I’ve searched throught he help/man pages many times looking for these flags and they always seem to evade me.

ag #

Passing the flag -l to ag will get it to list only the filepath, and not the match. Here I gave it a --md as well to only return markdown filetypes. ag supports a number of filetypes in a very similar way.

ag nvim --md -l

rg #

Giving rg the --files-with-matches flag will yield you a similar set of results, giving only the filepaths themselves and not the match statement. Also passing in the -g "*.md" will similarly yield only results from markdown files.

rg --files-with-matches you -g "*.md"

My first impressions with pyenv

2021-12-30T15:26:01Z

pyenv provides an easy way to install almost any version of python from a large list of distributions. I have simply been using the version of python from the os package manager for awhile, but recently I bumped my home system to Ubuntu 21.10 impish, and it is only 3.9+ while the libraries I needed were only compatable with up to 3.8.

I needed to install an older version of python on ubuntu

I’ve been wanting to check out pyenv for awhile now, but without a burning need to do so.

installing #

Based on the Readme it looked like I needed to install using homebrew,so this is what I did, but I later realized that there is a pyenv-installer repo that may have saved me this need.

Installing Homebrew on Linux

List out install candidates #

You can list all of the available versions to install with pyenv install --list. It does reccomend updating pyenv if you suspect that it is missing one. At the time of writing this comes out to 532 different versions!

pyenv install --list

Let’s install the latest 3.8 patch #

Installing a version is as easy as pyenv install 3.8.12. This will install it, but not make it active anywhere.

pyenv install 3.8.12

let’s use python 3.8.12 while in this directory #

Running pyenv local will set the version of python that we wish to use while in this directory and any directory underneath of it while using the pyenv command.

pyenv local python3.8.12

.python-version file #

This creates a .python-version files in the directory I ran it in, that contains simply the version number.

3.8.12

using with pipx #

I immediately ran into the same issue I was having before when trying to run pipx, as pipx was running my system python. I had to install pipx in the python3.8 environment to get it to use it.

pyenv exec pip install pipx
pyenv exec pipx run kedro new

python is still the system python #

When I open a terminal and call python its still my system python that I installed and set with update-alternatives. I am not sure if this is expected or based on how I had installed the system python previously, but it’s what happened on my system.

update-alternatives --query python

Name: python
Link: /home/walkers/.local/bin/python
Status: auto
Best: /usr/bin/python3
Value: /usr/bin/python3

making a virtual environment #

To make a virtual environment, I simply ran pyenv exec python in place of where I would normally run python and it worked for me. There is a whole package to get pyenv and venv to play nicely together, so I suspect that there is more to it, but this worked well for me and I was happy.

pyenv exec python -m venv .venv --prompt $(basename $PWD)

Now when my virtual environment is active it points to the python in that virtual environment, and is the version of python that was used to create the environment.

Links #

https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv#installation

Installing Homebrew on Linux

2021-12-29T20:24:48Z

Installing brew on linux proved quite easy and got pyenv running for me within 4 commands.

I had never used homebrew before, honestly I thought it was a mac only thing for years. Today I wanted to try out pyenv, and the reccommended way to install was using homebrew. I am not yet sure if I want either in my normal workflow, so for now I am just going to pop open a new terminal and install homebrew and see how it goes.

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
echo 'eval "$(/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/bin/brew shellenv)"' >> /home/walkers/.zprofile
eval "$(/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/bin/brew shellenv)"

That was it, now homebrew is working. Starting a new shell and running the command to install pyenv worked.

brew install pyenv

Links #

homebrew

Serve html from your command line

2021-12-28T20:24:48Z

When I first moved to vim from and ide like vscode or sublime text one of my very first issues was trying to preview my website at localhost:8000. There had always just been a button there to do it in all of my other editors, not vim. There are not many buttons for anything in vim. While there is probably a plugin that can run a webserver for me in vim, it’s not necessary, we just need the command line we are already in.

running a separate process #

You will need a way to run another process alongside vim, here are a couple ideas to get you going that are not the focus here.style

use background jobs
- c-z to send a job to the background
- fg to bring it back
use a second terminal
use a second tab
use tmux and run it in a separate split/window
use an embeded nvim terminal

running a development webserver from the command line #

Python already exists on most linux systems by default, and most are now on python3. If you are on windows typing python will take you directly to the windows store to install it, or you can also use wsl.

# python3
python -m http.server

# running on port 5000
python -m http.server --directory markout 5000

# for the low chance you are on python2
python -m SimpleHTTPServer

# running on port 5000
python -m SimpleHTTPServer 5000
python -m SimpleHTTPServer --directory markout 5000

using nodejs #

If you are a web developer it’s likely that you need nodejs and npm on your system anyways and may want to use one of the servers from npm. I’ll admit with these not being tied to the long term support of a language they are much more feature rich with things like compression out of the box. In my opinion they are nice things that you would want out of a production server, but may not be necessary for development.

installing npx #

# if you don't alredy have npx
npm i -g npx

npx is a handy tool that lets you run command line applications straight from npm without installing them. It pulls the latest version every time you want to run, then executes it without it being installed.

running the http-server with npx #

npx http-server

# running on port 5000
npx http-server -p 5000
npx http-server markout -p 5000

You must use augroup with autocmd in vim | Here's how

2021-12-08T08:43:43Z

If you are running vim autocmd’s without a group, you’re killing your performance. Granted your probably not sourcing your vimscript files with autocmd’s too often, but every time you source that vimscript you are adding another command that needs to run redundantly.

https://youtu.be/2ITTn4Dl0lc

This is what I had #

Not silky smooth

For WAAY too long I have had something like this in my vimrc or init.vim. It formats my python for me on every save, works great except if I source my dotfiles more than once I start adding how many times black runs.

autocmd bufwritepre *.py execute 'Black'

Why is a bare autocmd bad #

let me demonstrate

Lets create a new file called format.vim and give it the :so %. Works great, it starts telling me that its formatting.

autocmd bufwritepre *.py :echo("formatting with black")

BUT as every time I give it the :so % it formats an extra time on every single save.

Setting up an augroup #

I’ve been told I need an augroup to prevent duplicates. So I did it, and nothing changes, it still ran as many times as it was sources on every save.

augroup black
    autocmd bufwritepre *.py :echo("formatting with black")
augroup end

Clearing out the augroup #

What you need to do is clear out all commands in the augroup with autocmd! right at the beginning of the group.

augroup black
    autocmd!
    autocmd bufwritepre *.py :echo("formatting with black")
augroup end

My Final silky smooth setup #

Now this is what I have in my dotfiles for a silky smooth setup that does not run automds like crazy as I am making changes to my dotfiles.

augroup waylonwalker
    autocmd!
    autocmd bufwritepre *.py execute 'PyPreSave'
    autocmd bufwritepost *.py execute 'PyPostSave'
    autocmd bufwritepost .tmux.conf execute ':!tmux source-file %' autocmd bufwritepost .tmux.local.conf execute ':!tmux source-file %'
    autocmd bufwritepost *.vim execute ':source %'
augroup end

vim-help
youtube video for this article

Code Review from the comfort of vim | Diffurcate

2021-12-04T11:34:47Z

I often review Pull requests from the browser as it just makes it so easy to see the diffs and navigate through them, but there comes a time when the diffs get really big and hard to follow. That’s when its time to bring in the comforts of vim.

https://youtu.be/5NKaZFavM0E

Plugins needed #

This all stems from the great plugin by AndrewRadev. It breaks a down into a project. So rather than poping into a pager from git diff, you can pipe to diffurcate and it will setup a project in a tmp directory for you and you can browse this project just like any other except it’s just a diff.

Plug 'AndrewRadev/diffurcate.vim'

My aliases #

First to quickly checkout PR’s from azure devops I have setup an alias to fuzzy select a pr and let the az command do the checkout.

alias azcheckout='az repos pr checkout --id $(az repos pr list --output table | tail -n -2 | fzf | cut -d " " -f1)'

Next I have a few aliases setup for checking diffs. The first one checks what is staged vs the current branch, the others check the current branch vs main or master.

alias diffstaged="git diff --staged | nvim - +Diffurcate '+Telescope find_files'"
alias diffmain="git diff main.. | nvim - +Diffurcate '+Telescope find_files'"
alias diffmaster="git diff master.. | nvim - +Diffurcate '+Telescope find_files'"

diffcommit() {
    git diff $1 | nvim - +Diffurcate '+Telescope find_files'
}

Links #

diffurcte.vim

Setup a yaml schema | yamlls for a silky smooth setup

2021-12-03T23:24:52Z

I’ve gone far too long without a good setup for editing yaml files, I am missing out on autocomplete and proper diagnostics. This ends today as I setup yaml-language-server in neovim.

https://youtu.be/xo4HrFoKF4c

The video for this one is part of a challenge-playlist I put out for myself to constantly improve my dotfiles for all of December.

init.vim #

I have my init.vim setup to only source other modules, if you want everything in a single config, feel free to do as you wish. I broke mine up earlier this year as I doubled into nvim and am not going back.

source ~/.config/nvim/plugins.vim
lua require'waylonwalker.cmp'
lua require'waylonwalker.lsp-config'

Plugin setup #

You will need the following plugins. I use plug, if you don’t you will have to convert the syntax over to the plugin manager you use.

neovim/nvim-lspconfig is for configuring the lsp. It comes with a bunch of sane defaults for most servers, so you pretty much just have to call setup on that server unless you want to change the defaults.

hrsh7th/nvim-cmp is what I use for autocomplete. If you are using something else you might need to set that up in a different way in order to get the autocomplete to work. You will still get the diagnostics with just lsp-config.

kabouzeid/nvim-lspinstall will aide in installing lsp’s if you want. I have chosen not to because I want to have my full setup scripted so when I setup any new machine I just run my ansible-playbook. This library is nice to just set things up quick and play with them.

" /home/u_walkews/.config/nvim/plugins.vim
Plug 'neovim/nvim-lspconfig'

" if you want to use nvim-cmp
Plug 'hrsh7th/nvim-cmp'
Plug 'hrsh7th/cmp-nvim-lsp'

" if you want to use lsp-install
Plug 'kabouzeid/nvim-lspinstall'

cmp config #

Make sure that you have nvim_lsp as a source in your cmp config. This is my config as of now, its likely to change in the future, set yours up how you like. hrsh7th has a really good readme if you want help configuring cmp.

Again if you don’t use cmp you can skip this step, cmp is for autocomplete. You can use a different plugin for autocomplete, or not use a plugin at all if that’s your thing.

--  ~/.config/nvim/lua/waylonwalker/lsp-config.lua
-- Setup nvim-cmp.
local cmp = require'cmp'

cmp.setup({
snippet = {
    expand = function(args)
    -- For `vsnip` user.
    vim.fn["vsnip#anonymous"](args.body)

    -- For `luasnip` user.
    -- require('luasnip').lsp_expand(args.body)

    -- For `ultisnips` user.
    -- vim.fn["UltiSnips#Anon"](args.body)
    end,
},
mapping = {
  ['<C-n>'] = cmp.mapping.select_next_item({ behavior = cmp.SelectBehavior.Insert }),
  ['<C-p>'] = cmp.mapping.select_prev_item({ behavior = cmp.SelectBehavior.Insert }),
  ['<Down>'] = cmp.mapping.select_next_item({ behavior = cmp.SelectBehavior.Select }),
  ['<Up>'] = cmp.mapping.select_prev_item({ behavior = cmp.SelectBehavior.Select }),
  ['<C-d>'] = cmp.mapping.scroll_docs(-4),
  ['<C-f>'] = cmp.mapping.scroll_docs(4),
  ['<C-Space>'] = cmp.mapping.complete(),
  ['<C-e>'] = cmp.mapping.close(),
  ['<CR>'] = cmp.mapping.confirm({
    behavior = cmp.ConfirmBehavior.Replace,
    select = true,
    })
},
sources = {
    { name = 'nvim_lsp' },
    { name = 'vsnip' },
    { name = 'path' },
    { name = 'buffer' },
    { name = 'calc' },
    { name = 'tmux' },
}
})

lsp config #

Next up is the heart of this post, the lsp-config.lua. This one is pretty straight forward, require lspconfig (which you need the plugin for), then set it up with cmp and the extra schemas. I’m sure there are yaml schemas for tons of things, I’ll probably add more in the future, but for now, this is what I have.

--  ~/.config/nvim/lua/waylonwalker/lsp-config.lua
require'lspconfig'.yamlls.setup{
    on_attach=on_attach,
    capabilities = require('cmp_nvim_lsp').update_capabilities(vim.lsp.protocol.make_client_capabilities()),
    settings = {
        yaml = {
            schemas = {
                ["https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kedro-org/kedro/develop/static/jsonschema/kedro-catalog-0.17.json"]= "conf/**/*catalog*",
                ["https://json.schemastore.org/github-workflow.json"] = "/.github/workflows/*"
            }
        }
    }
}

Follow the YouTube channel or the rss-feed to stay up to date.

Also Check out My python lsp setup #

https://waylonwalker.com/setup-pylsp/

Open files FAST from zsh | or bash if thats your thing

2021-12-02T11:34:47Z

https://youtu.be/PQw_is7rQSw

I am often in a set of tmux splits flying back and forth, accidentally close my editor, so when I come back to that split and hit my keybinds to edit files I enter them into zsh rather than into nvim like I intended. Today I am going to sand off that rough edge and get as similar behavior to nvim as I can with a couple of aliases.

Make sure you check out the YouTube video to see all of my improvements.

what’s an alias #

If you have never heard of an alias before it’s essentially a shortcut to a given command. You can pass additional flags to the underlying command and they will get passed in. Most of the time they are just shorter versions of commands that you run often or even like in this case a common muscle memory typo that occurs for you.

My new alias’s for fuzzy editing files from zsh #

Here are the new aliases that I came up with to smooth out my workflow. These give me a similar feel to how these keys work in neovim but from zsh.

# fuzzy select file to edit
alias p='nvim `fzf --preview="bat --color always {}"`'

# give me the same syntax as edit while in neovim
alias :e='nvim '

Follow the YouTube channel or the rss feed to stay up to date.

playlist for my dotfiles challenge

How linux users install a text editor

2021-11-30T23:18:24Z

In honor of the neovim 0.6.0 release, I decided to do a funny skit installing neovim, and fix up my install script in the process as part of my challenge to fix up my dotfiles. I ran into one snag where I was not updating the repo that I cloned. I moved it to the directory I now keep third-party git repos and set it to update with ansible.

https://youtu.be/64oKLphhBuo

The thing that took me the longest to realize was…. I had a path issue pointing me to an old install of the appimage over the fresh build, fixed that up and now we are on 0.7.0 nightly.

https://neovim.io/ https://github.com/neovim/neovim https://github.com/neovim/neovim/releases/tag/v0.6.0

30 days dotfile ricing

2021-11-29T11:34:47Z

https://youtu.be/Jq1Y48F_rOU

I am challenging myself to 30 days of dotfile ricing. I have been on linux desktop for a few months now and have a pretty good workflow going, I have the coarse edits done to my workflow, but it has some rough edges that need sanded down. It’s time to squash some of those little annoyances that still exist in my setup.

This is primarily going to be focused on productivity, but may have a few things to just look better. This will comprise heavily of aliases, zsh, and nvim config.

Follow the YouTube channel or the rss feed to stay up to date.

Update Alternatives in Linux

2021-11-20T10:38:00Z

update-alternatives --query python

update-alternatives: error: no alternatives for python

sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/local/bin/python python `which python3.8` 2
# update-alternatives: using /usr/bin/python3.8 to provide /usr/local/bin/python (python) in auto mode

sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/local/bin/python python `which python2.7` 5
# update-alternatives: using /usr/bin/python2.7 to provide /usr/local/bin/python (python) in auto mode

update-alternatives --query python
# Name: python
# Link: /usr/local/bin/python
# Status: auto
# Best: /usr/bin/python2.7
# Value: /usr/bin/python2.7
#
# Alternative: /usr/bin/python2.7
# Priority: 5
#
# Alternative: /usr/bin/python3.8
# Priority: 2

sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/local/bin/python python `which python3.8` 20
# update-alternatives: using /usr/bin/python3.8 to provide /usr/local/bin/python (python) in auto mode

JUT | Read Notebooks in the Terminal

2021-11-20T10:38:00Z

Trying to read a .ipynb file without starting a jupyter server? jut has you covered.

https://youtu.be/t8AvImnwor0

watch the video version of this post on YouTube

install #

jut is packaged and available on pypi so installing is as easy as pip installing it.

pip install jut

! This is my first time including snippets of the video in the article like this, let me know what you think!

examples #

jut https://cantera.org/examples/jupyter/thermo/flame_temperature.ipynb
jut https://cantera.org/examples/jupyter/thermo/flame_temperature.ipynb --head 3
jut https://cantera.org/examples/jupyter/thermo/flame_temperature.ipynb --tail 2

what are all the commands available for jut? #

Take a look at the help of the jut cli to explore all the options that it offers.

jut --help

There is some good information on the projects readme as well.

without installing #

using pipx

Don’t want jut cluttering up your venv, or want to save yourself from making a new one, pipx can manage a separate virual environment for you. This is one of the biggest selling points for me.

pipx run jut https://cantera.org/examples/jupyter/thermo/flame_temperature.ipynb --head 3

nbconvert #

jut is the lightweight option that I think will fit the bill often for me, but it just doesn’t always cut it. Mostly if there are images in the notebook or large output that is hard to read, its time to pull out the medium guns that sit between fulling running jupyter and jut.

pip install nbconvert

nbconvert does not have its own cli, instead it sits under the jupyter command.

html">converting to html #

Need to see images, go here!

wget https://cantera.org/examples/jupyter/thermo/flame_temperature.ipynb
jupyter nbconvert flame_temperature.ipynb --to html
python -m http.server

Note, nb convert does not work with a url, you will need to have the notebook locally.

what other options does nbconvert offer? #

nbconvert also offers a standard help flag that you can access by passing in the --help flag

jupyter nbconvert --help

converting to markdown #

nbconvert also supports converting to many other formats, one option that is quite interesting for use in the terminal is markdown. We could simply convert the notebook to markdown and cat it out.

jupyter nbconvert flame_temperature.ipynb --to maarkdown
cat flameflame_temperature.md

viewing markdown with glow #

Glow is a terminal markdown viewer that looks really good. These days I use bat as cat so I don’t get quite as much benefit from glow, but it still looks pretty good.

glow flameflame_temperature.md

viewing markdown as slides with lookatme #

lookatme

Lookatme is my slideshow tool of choice. Creating slides in markdown is such a fantasic user experience, It realy lets you go from outline to finished slide deck fluidly. Refactoring the whole thing is also so much easier than with gui tools. Once you have your idea fleshed out it does make the process of making slides in powerpoint much easier if thats what you need.

On to nbconvert, without even changing the notebook we can look at the notebook as a slideshow in the terminal. The only thing that it needs is some markdown headers to start new slides from.

lookatme flameflame_temperature.md

viewing markdown with rich #

Bringing this full circle, lets take a look at the converted markdown with rich. Here you will notice a surprising similarity to what we saw with jut.

pip install rich
python -m rich.markdown flame_temperature.md

Rich still cannot pull directly from a url or display markdown with out being installed and managed by yourself. Unlike how jut can leverage pipx to manage the installation sandbox for you.

Links #

jut - View notebooks in the terminal
nbconvert - convert notebooks to other formats
flame-temperature notebook - The sample notebook I used
glow - Terminal Markdown viewer
lookatme - Terminal Markdown slideshow tool
pipx - Run python cli’s without maintianing a virtual environment
rich - Beautiful python terminal formatter

I made a neovim plugin

2021-10-05T08:04:44Z

I’ve slowly adding more and more lua functions into my neovim configuration, and recently I noticed a pattern for a class of functions that reach out to run shell commands that can be abstracted away.

https://youtu.be/8m5ipBuopPU

Telegraph.nvim #

Check out the project readme for the most up to date details on the plugin itself.

Motivation #

I want a simple way to make remaps into shell commands that can open new tmux windows, popups, or just run a command with context from the editor.

For example I want to make remaps to do things like open the current file in lookatme.

# vim :terminal
nnoremap <leader>s <cmd>Telegraph pipx run lookatme {filepath} --live-reload --style gruvbox-dark<cmd>

# tmux session
nnoremap <leader><leader>s <cmd>lua require'telegraph'.telegraph({cmd='pipx run lookatme {filepath} --live-reload --style gruvbox-dark', how='tmux'})<CR>

# tmux popup
nnoremap <leader><leader>S <cmd>lua require'telegraph'.telegraph({cmd='pipx run lookatme {filepath} --live-reload --style gruvbox-dark', how='tmux_popup'})<CR>

The main goal here is that remaps become one liners that can just be put directly in my init.vim without creating a whole new lua module for each shell command I want to bind.

how #

telegraph takes in a how argument to determine where to tun the command.j

term(default) runs command in the built in terminal
tmux runs command in a new tmux session and joins it.
tmux_popup runs command in a tmux popup window.
tmux_popup_session runs command in a tmux session and displays it in a popup
subprocess runs command in a subprocess

Format strings #

The current set of format strings that can be used with telegraph. Placing these in braces {} within your command will get rendered into something with context from the editor.

cword - the current word under the cursor
cWORD - the current BIG Word under the cursor
cline - the current line under the cursor
filepath - the filepath of the current file
filename - the filename of the current file
parent - the parent directory of the current file
current_session_name - name of the current tmux session
cwd - the current working directory

Give it a ⭐ #

Check out the repo and give it a star if its something that interests you.

tmux targeted session

2021-08-02T23:51:21Z

https://youtu.be/5KE7Il7SOEk

This is something that I made up but use every single day, this is what keeps much of what is on my blog or my teams private work wiki going. I have a few very important directories that I have assigned directly to a hotkey for fast session switching.

bind -n M-i new-session -A -s waylonwalker_com "cd ~/git/waylonwalker.com/ && nvim"
bind i popup -E -h 95% -w 95% -x 100% "tmux new-session -A -s waylonwalker_com 'cd ~/git/waylonwalker.com/ && nvim'"
bind -n M-I popup -E "tmux new-session -A -s waylonwalker_com 'cd ~/git/waylonwalker.com/ && nvim'"

tmux new-session

This one is building off of yeserday’s new-session post, make sure you check that one out as well.

How I navigate tmux in 2021

for more information on how I navigate tmux, check out this full post

Also check out the full YouTube tmux-playlist to see all of the videos in this series.

tmux detach

2021-08-01T23:51:21Z

https://youtu.be/A1qx3tNKDdA

tmux detach is a handy tmux command that will quit your current session while keeping it running. The full name of the comamnd is detach-client, detach is a shorthand.

default keybinding

bind-key          d detach-client

I have mine bound to mod+d where mod is alt.

bind -n M-d detach-client

https://waylonwalker.com/tmux-nav-2021/

for more information on how I navigate tmux, check out this full post

Also check out the full YouTube tmux-playlist to see all of the videos in this series.

notify-send

2021-08-01T10:33:17Z

xinput float $(xinput list --id-only "AT Translated Set 2 keyboard") | notify-send "laptop keeb floated" -i ~/Pictures/8bitcc.png

tmux attach

2021-07-31T23:51:21Z

https://youtu.be/JQ0yDCVu44E

attach is one of the most useful features of tmux. If you have no interest in tmux for pane and window management, you should use tmux for this. It can be a life saver if you ever get disconnected from the host machine or accidently close your terminal you can connect right back into the session you were just in using attach.

attach #

tmux attach

this command will simply attach back to tmux if you are ever disconnected

If you ever run long running tasks on a remote machine by sshing into this you should be doing it inside tmux, or something like tmux so that you do not loose your work.

attach to a specific session #

If you have multiple sessions running you can select the session that you want to attach to by passing -t <name-of-session>.

tmux attach -t scratch

How I navigate tmux in 2021

for more information on how I navigate tmux, check out this full post

Also check out the full YouTube tmux-playlist to see all of the videos in this series.

tmux ls

2021-07-30T23:51:21Z

https://youtu.be/LY41GLn_DGg

tmux ls will list the sessions that you have running within the tmux server if tmux is currently running. This is handy to combine with commands such as attach.

tmux ls

tmux attach

How I navigate tmux in 2021

for more information on how I navigate tmux, check out this full post

Also check out the full YouTube tmux-playlist to see all of the videos in this series.

tmux command line

2021-07-29T23:51:21Z

https://youtu.be/SNu-4IrkjAs

So far we have covered a lot of tmux commands and how they map to keybindings but these same commands can be executed at the command line.

From the command line #

Let’s make a popup that displays our git status for 5s or until we close it manually. We can run the following command at the command line, in a split.

tmux display-popup -E -d '#{pane_current_path}' 'git status && sleep 5'

From the tmux command line #

Or we can open the tmux command line and run it from tmux’s built in command line, which is very similar to bim EX mode. By default the tmux command line can be opened with prefix+[.

display-popup -E -d '#{pane_current_path}' 'git status && sleep 5'

🗒️ note that the tmux command is called by default when inside of tmux.

Make it a keybinding #

Finally we can make it a keybinding by adding a bind command ahead of our tmux command, then we can execute this in the tmux command line or add it to our ~/.tmux.conf.

bind s display-popup -E -d '#{pane_current_path}' 'git status && sleep 5'

How I navigate tmux in 2021

for more information on how I navigate tmux, check out this full post

Also check out the full YouTube tmux-playlist to see all of the videos in this series.

tmux copy-mode

2021-07-28T23:51:21Z

https://youtu.be/-ypY_-VmBKk

tmux copy-mode is a tmux mode that lets you scroll, search, copy, and jump your way through a pane. There are a ton of keybindings for copy-mode, the main ones you will need to know are / for searching down ? for searching up, n for next item, space for starting a selection, and enter to copy the selection. Arrow keys will be used for navigation unless you have specified vi mode, then it will be hjkl.

Default keybinding to get into copy mode is prefix+[.

bind-key          [ copy-mode

If you are a vim user you will likely want to use vi style keys, add this to your ~/.tmux.conf file to enable vi mode.

setw -g mode-keys vi

full list of copy-mode keybindings from the man page.

  Command                                      vi              emacs
           append-selection
           append-selection-and-cancel                  A
           back-to-indentation                          ^               M-m
           begin-selection                              Space           C-Space
           bottom-line                                  L
           cancel                                       q               Escape
           clear-selection                              Escape          C-g
           copy-end-of-line [<prefix>]                  D               C-k
           copy-line [<prefix>]
           copy-pipe [<command>] [<prefix>]
           copy-pipe-no-clear [<command>] [<prefix>]
           copy-pipe-and-cancel [<command>] [<prefix>]
           copy-selection [<prefix>]
           copy-selection-no-clear [<prefix>]
           copy-selection-and-cancel [<prefix>]         Enter           M-w
           cursor-down                                  j               Down
           cursor-down-and-cancel
           cursor-left                                  h               Left
           cursor-right                                 l               Right
           cursor-up                                    k               Up
           end-of-line                                  $               C-e
           goto-line <line>                             :               g
           halfpage-down                                C-d             M-Down
           halfpage-down-and-cancel
           halfpage-up                                  C-u             M-Up
           history-bottom                               G               M->
           history-top                                  g               M-<
           jump-again                                   ;               ;
           jump-backward <to>                           F               F
           jump-forward <to>                            f               f
           jump-reverse                                 ,               ,
           jump-to-backward <to>                        T
           jump-to-forward <to>                         t
           jump-to-mark                                 M-x             M-x
           middle-line                                  M               M-r
           next-matching-bracket                        %               M-C-f
           next-paragraph                               }               M-}
           next-space                                   W
           next-space-end                               E
           next-word                                    w
           next-word-end                                e               M-f
           other-end                                    o
           page-down                                    C-f             PageDown
           page-down-and-cancel
           page-up                                      C-b             PageUp
           pipe [<command>] [<prefix>]
           pipe-no-clear [<command>] [<prefix>]
           pipe-and-cancel [<command>] [<prefix>]
           previous-matching-bracket                                    M-C-b
           previous-paragraph                           {               M-{
           previous-space                               B
           previous-word                                b               M-b
           rectangle-on
           rectangle-off
           rectangle-toggle                             v               R
           refresh-from-pane                            r               r
           scroll-down                                  C-e             C-Down
           scroll-down-and-cancel
           scroll-up                                    C-y             C-Up
           search-again                                 n               n
           search-backward <for>                        ?
           search-backward-incremental <for>                            C-r
           search-backward-text <for>
           search-forward <for>                         /
           search-forward-incremental <for>                             C-s
           search-forward-text <for>
           search-reverse                               N               N
           select-line                                  V
           select-word
           set-mark                                     X               X
           start-of-line                                0               C-a
           stop-selection
           top-line                                     H               M-R

How I navigate tmux in 2021

for more information on how I navigate tmux, check out this full post

Also check out the full YouTube tmux-playlist to see all of the videos in this series.

tmux join-pane

2021-07-27T23:51:21Z

https://youtu.be/Vm5rRtcVXLw

Join-pane allows you to join panes that you have broken away from your window, or created in a different window to the window you want it in. As far as I know there is not a default keybinding for it.

Before you can join a pane you must first have a pane marked to join. Once you mark a pane, go back to the window you want to join it to and join-pane.

My keybindings, you must add this to your ~/.tmux.conf file to use them.

# Mark and swap panes
#――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――
bind -n M-m select-pane -m # mark
bind -n M-M select-pane -M # unmark

bind -n M-< join-pane

How I navigate tmux in 2021

for more information on how I navigate tmux, check out this full post

Also check out the full YouTube tmux-playlist to see all of the videos in this series.

tmux break-pane

2021-07-26T23:51:21Z

https://youtu.be/ICL609F2xnc

Break-pane is a handy tmux command when your layout gets too cramped and you want to just move a split into its own window. Calling break-pane does exactly that, it creates a new-window for you and moves your currently selected split into that window

Default key binding for break-pane

bind-key          ! break-pane

How I navigate tmux in 2021

for more information on how I navigate tmux, check out this full post

tmux zoom

2021-07-25T23:51:21Z

https://youtu.be/Rn6mOarCQ-Y

Zooming into the current split in tmux is a valuable tool to give yourself some screen real estate. These days I am almost always presenting, streaming, or pairing up with a co-worker over a video call. Since I am always sharing my screen I am generally zoomed in to a level that is just a bit uncomfortable, so anytime I make a split it is really uncomfortable, being able to zoom into the split I am focused on is a big help, and also help anyone watching follow where I am currently working.

Default key bindings for zooming the current split

bind-key          z resize-pane -Z

I have rebound this to match the default binding with mod+z rather so that I get that single keystroke experience.

bind -n M-z resize-pane -Z

How I navigate tmux in 2021

for more information on how I navigate tmux, check out this full post

tmux new-window

2021-07-24T23:51:21Z

https://youtu.be/YRPZBv-iYyE

New window as it sounds makes new windows in tmux. Windows are kind of like tabs. They are another screen within your sessions that you can name and make new panes in.

Default key bindings for creating and navigating windows in tmux.

bind-key          c new-window
bind-key          p previous-window
bind-key          n next-window

As always I have rebound these keys because I generally prefer a single keystroke over the prefix plus keybinding approach that tmux gives by default.

#――windows――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――
bind -n M-c new-window -c '#{pane_current_path}'
bind -n M-p previous-window
bind -n M-n next-window

When I started using tmux I did almost everything in one giant session with many panes and windows. It became a nightmare to manage and quickly get between two sets work efficiently. This year I leaned in on sessions quite heavily. Checkout this 👇 post to see that workflow in depth.

How I navigate tmux in 2021

for more information on how I navigate tmux, check out this full post

tmux slect-pane

2021-07-23T23:51:21Z

https://youtu.be/CPZJZjN9YTY

These are my MOST often used keybindings that I use in tmux. They allow me to jump between splits with ease with a vim style layout. I can hold mod and jump between panes with a familiar arrow key.

bind -n M-h select-pane -L
bind -n M-l select-pane -R
bind -n M-k select-pane -U
bind -n M-j select-pane -D

How I navigate tmux in 2021

for more information on how I navigate tmux, check out this full post

tmux rotate-window

2021-07-22T23:51:21Z

https://youtu.be/06z5qf81ofo

Rotate window is the main way that I navigated tmux before I learned select-pane. It allows you to change your focused pane, or rotate the position of the panes easily.

Default keybindings

bind-key        C-o rotate-window
bind-key          o select-pane -t :.+

My keybindings look just a bit different than the default ones, I do not like needing to hit prefix for every command, especially for repeated commands. I set a similar keybinding to the default one that uses mod instead of prefix.

bind -n M-o select-pane -t :.+
bind -n M-O rotate-window

How I navigate tmux in 2021

for more information on how I navigate tmux, check out this full post

tmux select-layout

2021-07-21T23:51:21Z

https://youtu.be/F0mHnwTrNNc

When you get many splits going in tmux sometimes its time for a new layout. There are four layout strategies that I use, main-vertical, main-horizontal, even-vertical, even-horizontal. Almost always I am useing the main ones with mod plus a or mod plus shift a keybindings.

# Select Layouts
#―――――――――――――――――
bind -n M-a select-layout main-vertical
bind -n M-A select-layout main-horizontal
bind -n M-E select-layout even-vertical
bind -n M-V select-layout even-horizontal

How I navigate tmux in 2021

for more information on how I navigate tmux, check out this full post

tmux resize-panes

2021-07-20T23:51:21Z

https://youtu.be/hpFYE2LU7xc

Resizing panes in tmux can be quite difficult in default tmux, I use a set of keybingings to help resize panes in the rare occasions that I do need just a bit more space. I set the keybinding to the same as my split navigation bindings but shifted. They are very vim like (h,j,k,l).

# resize panes
#―――――――――――――――――――――――――――――
bind -n M-H resize-pane -L 2
bind -n M-L resize-pane -R 2
bind -n M-K resize-pane -U 2
bind -n M-J resize-pane -D 2

Most often when I need to resize panes I just grab the edge of the pane with my mouse. Yes the mouse, its not that often that I actually need to change the size of a pane.

# Enable mouse control (clickable windows, panes, resizable panes)
set -g mouse on

How I navigate tmux in 2021

for more information on how I navigate tmux, check out this full post

tmux choose-tree

2021-07-19T23:51:21Z

https://youtu.be/79Y-kqAiMpw

Choose tree is a powerful tmux utility that provides a graphical interface to preview all sessions, windows, and panes, move between them kill them, move them and much more.

The default keybinding

bind-key -T prefix s choose-tree -s

my preferred keybinding to open sessions and windows collapsed and Zoomed in.

bind-key j choose-tree -swZ

From the man page.

choose-tree [-GNrswZ] [-F format] [-f filter] [-K key-format] [-O sort-order] [-t target-pane] [template]
        Put a pane into tree mode, where a session, window or pane may be chosen interactively from a tree.  Each session, window or pane is shown on
        one line.  A shortcut key is shown on the left in brackets allowing for immediate choice, or the tree may be navigated and an item chosen or
        otherwise manipulated using the keys below.  -s starts with sessions collapsed and -w with windows collapsed.  -Z zooms the pane.  The follow‐
        ing keys may be used in tree mode:

            Key    Function
            Enter  Choose selected item
            Up     Select previous item
            Down   Select next item
            +      Expand selected item
            -      Collapse selected item
            M-+    Expand all items
            M--    Collapse all items
            x      Kill selected item
            X      Kill tagged items
            <      Scroll list of previews left
            >      Scroll list of previews right
            C-s    Search by name
            m      Set the marked pane
            M      Clear the marked pane
            n      Repeat last search
            t      Toggle if item is tagged
            T      Tag no items
            C-t    Tag all items
            :      Run a command for each tagged item
            f      Enter a format to filter items
            H      Jump to the starting pane
            O      Change sort field
            r      Reverse sort order
            v      Toggle preview
            q      Exit mode

        After a session, window or pane is chosen, ‘%%’ is replaced by the target in template and the result executed as a command.  If template is
        not given, "switch-client -t '%%'" is used.

        -O specifies the initial sort field: one of ‘index’, ‘name’, or ‘time’.  -r reverses the sort order.  -f specifies an initial filter: the fil‐
        ter is a format - if it evaluates to zero, the item in the list is not shown, otherwise it is shown.  If a filter would lead to an empty list,
        it is ignored.  -F specifies the format for each item in the tree and -K a format for each shortcut key; both are evaluated once for each
        line.  -N starts without the preview.  -G includes all sessions in any session groups in the tree rather than only the first.  This command
        works only if at least one client is attached.

https://waylonwalker.com/tmux-nav-2021/

for more information on how I navigate tmux, check out this full post

tmux prefix

2021-07-18T23:51:21Z

https://youtu.be/BMkpbfhbkKM

The prefix key is an essential part of tmux, by default all of tmux’s key-bindings sit behind a prefix. This prefix is very similar to vim’s leader key. It is common for folks to change the default C-b (control b) to C-a or if they are a vim user something to match their vim leader key.

set -g prefix C-Space
bind Space send-prefix

A few of the essential default key-bindings.

%      vertical split
"      horizontal split
d      detach

up     select up one pane
down   select down one pane
right  select right one pane
left   select left one pane

t      clock
o      swap panes
c      create window
n      next window
p      previous window

A more complete list of key-bindings can be found in this gist https://gist.github.com/mzmonsour/8791835.

How I navigate tmux in 2021

for more information on how I navigate tmux, check out this full post

tmux splitting panes

2021-07-17T23:51:21Z

https://youtu.be/kzgyiHap1nQ

splitting panes is a core feature of tmux. It allows us to split the terminal vertically or horizontally into new panes.

bind -n M-s split-window -c '#{pane_current_path}'
bind -n M-v split-window -h -c '#{pane_current_path}'
bind -n M-X kill-pane

🗒️ note that ‘#{pane_current_path}‘will keep the split in the same directory as it’s parent, without this it will default to your home directory.

How I navigate tmux in 2021

for more information on how I navigate tmux, check out this full post

tmux last session

2021-07-16T23:51:21Z

https://youtu.be/RB87EEnnMnU

An ultimate productivity key-binding in tmux is one to switch to the last session. I use this to quickly get between sessions really quick. Often I am working and need to lookup a quick note, or copy something into my notes, then get back to where I was quickly.

bind -n M-b switch-client -l

I think of this hub and spoke model, and use last-session to quickly drive it.

How I navigate tmux in 2021

for more information on how I navigate tmux, check out this full post

tmux floating popups

2021-07-15T23:51:21Z

https://youtu.be/2ZqFDsJywt8

Tmux popups are actually floating windows that you can drag around the screen. They always open in the middle (by default) when you open them, no matter where you leave them.

Here are a couple of keybindings I use to open up popup windows.

bind C-g display-popup -E "ta ~/git"
bind -n M-g display-popup -E "tmux new-session -A -s scratch"

How I navigate tmux in 2021

for more information on how I navigate tmux, check out this full post

tmux popups

2021-07-14T23:51:21Z

https://youtu.be/2I8fB28zfB4

Tmux-popups are a great feature that is relatively new to tmux, many repos such as the standard ubuntu repos do not have it. Popups came in 3.2a, if your package manager does not have it, you can follow the tmux’s install instructions to build from source.

# open a popup scratchpad
bind -n M-g display-popup -E "tmux new-session -A -s scratch"

How I navigate tmux in 2021

for more information on how I navigate tmux, check out this full post

I use popups quite a bit in my workflow to ssh into another machine for a short period, or make a new project with a template.

Copy and Paste on Linux

2021-06-25T20:50:45Z

These are the notes that I used as I set up my first ever ubuntu desktop.

gnome-tweaks #

sudo apt install gnome-tweaks

nordix gtk theme #

I ran this, but have no idea if it had any effect as the theme did not show up until I relogged.

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences theme Nordic

What I think actuagnome terminal showing scrollbar in tmuxlly worked was

emoji support #

One thing that I really missed quite early from windows was the emoji virtual keyboard. I like being able to quickly toss in those emoji that give just a bit of a visual cue 🔥, ⚠️,, 🎉, 🦄, 💜.

installation #

I found an application called emote. that seems to do everything I need it to in the snap store. Installation is a typicall snap install.

sudo snap install emote

default keybinding #

The application came with a default keybinding ctrl+alt+e, but I could never remember it.

ctrl+alt+e

Windows keybinding #

Old habits are hard to break, I opened up the gnome settings and set a hotkey to super+; to run the command emote.

Super+;

How it works #

Get that dock outta here #

I tried to disable the dock and it didn’t immediately work for me, likely because I needed to relog. I really have no use for the dock though as I will always open applications with a hotkey or super + search.

sudo apt remove gnome-shell-extension-ubuntu-dock

Terminal One Dark Theme #

I don’t stress too hard on themes, I just want something halfway consistent and just works. I typically have just used a semi-popular theme “one-dark” everywhere. This was the default theme in GitHub’s Atom text editor that I never used. I only care that it looks good and is popular enought that it just exists everywhere.

bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/denysdovhan/gnome-terminal-one/master/one-dark.sh)"

I found these to be ugly ans unnecessary so I turned them off. You can access all the menu items by right clicking on the terminal anyways, so there is no reason to let it take up any screen real estate.

Hiding the scrollbar #

Hiding the menubar #

vim clipboard #

sudo apt install xsel

set clipboard+=unnamedplus

tmux clipboard #

# Copy and Paste on Linux
bind -T copy-mode-vi Enter send-keys -X copy-pipe-and-cancel "xclip -i -f -selection primary | xclip -i -selection clipboard"
set-option -s set-clipboard off
bind-key -T copy-mode-vi MouseDragEnd1Pane send-keys -X copy-pipe-and-cancel "xclip -selection clipboard -i"

Hotkeys #

Key	Desc
super+j	move to workspace below
super+k	move to workspace above
super+shift+j	move window one workspace down
super+shift+k	move window one workspace up

Key	Command	Desc
Super+e	nautilus	File Browser
Super+Shift+p	Area Screenshot	gnome-screenshot -a
Super+Alt+p	Area Screenshot to clipboard	gnome-screenshot -ac
Super+e	nautilus	File Browser

screenshots #

I am constantly taking screenshots for my daily workflow, on Windows I had it setup to both send to the clipboard and store in a screenshots directory.

# take a screenshot and Store it as a file.
gnome-screenshot -a

# take a screenshot and send it to the clipboard
gnome-screenshot -ac

obs #

As od Jun 2021 the version of obs-studio installed using the instructions in their wiki is out of date. I had success getting the latest version, which supports virtual webcams, using snap.

sudo snap install obs-studio

virtual webcam #

After getting the latest version of obs-studio whixh supports virtual webcam it still did not start. After some searching I found that updating v4l2loopback resolved the issue.

sudo apt purge v4l2loopback-dkms
git clone https://github.com/umlaeute/v4l2loopback.git ~/git/v4l2loopback/
cd ~/git/v4l2loopback/
make
sudo make install

sudo modprobe v4l2loopback devices=1 exclusive_caps=1

sudo depmod -a
sudo modprobe v4l2loopback video_nr=10 card_label="OBS Video Source" exclusive_caps=1

i3 #

I decided to give i3 a try, simply apt install it, then it shows up under the gear icon at the login screen after a reboot. At this point I don’t think I am ready for i3. I have just changed a bunch of stuff in my workflow and honestly I got a decent gnome config setup in like 10 minutes.

sudo apt install i3

How I configure git

2021-06-25T20:50:45Z

Git can be a bit tricky to get configured correctly. I often stumble into config issues weeks after setting up a new machine that I did not even notice. These are my notes to remind me how I configure git.

Identity #

git config --global user.name "John Doe"
git config --global user.email johndoe@example.com

rebase #

editor #

git config --global core.editor nvim

default branch #

git config --global init.defaultBranch main

push to current bransh wihtout setting upstream #

git config --global push.default current

Autostash #

git config pull.rebase true
git config rebase.autoStash true

python lsp setup

2021-05-17T16:13:42Z

Setting up python with the native nvim>0.5 lsp was mr

lsp-config #

https://github.com/neovim/nvim-lspconfig

lua << EOF
require'lspconfig'.pyright.setup{}
EOF

pyls#190 #

https://github.com/palantir/python-language-server/issues/190

lspconfig.pyls.setup {
  cmd = {"pyls"},
  filetypes = {"python"},
  settings = {
    pyls = {
      configurationSources = {"flake8"},
      plugins = {
        jedi_completion = {enabled = true},
        jedi_hover = {enabled = true},
        jedi_references = {enabled = true},
        jedi_signature_help = {enabled = true},
        jedi_symbols = {enabled = true, all_scopes = true},
        pycodestyle = {enabled = false},
        flake8 = {
          enabled = true,
          ignore = {},
          maxLineLength = 160
        },
        mypy = {enabled = false},
        isort = {enabled = false},
        yapf = {enabled = false},
        pylint = {enabled = false},
        pydocstyle = {enabled = false},
        mccabe = {enabled = false},
        preload = {enabled = false},
        rope_completion = {enabled = false}
      }
    }
  },
  on_attach = on_attach
}

mypy #

Getting mypy working with lsp was tricky for me. I had some issues trying to run mypy in ci and pyright in my editor and I really wanted them to match.

pipx install 'python-lsp-server[all]'
pipx inject python-lsp-server pylsp-mypy

How I navigate tmux in 2021

2021-05-11T09:14:07Z

In 2021 I changed the way I navigate between tmux sessions big time. Now I can create, kill, switch with ease, and generally keep work separated into logical groups.

Update #

Since making this post, I have made ~20 other posts in short form that all have a YouTube video to go along with them you can find them all on my tmux-playlist.

Chris Toomey’s Tmux Course #

I took Chris’s tmux course in December 2020 and it was fantastic. Even as a seasoned tmux user, I learned quite a bit. Before the course, I was proficient in navigating within each of my tmux sessions but rarely started more than one session. A few months later, I have adopted a lot of what I learned from Chris and made it my own.

I am now keeping projects to their own session and can move between them fluidly with just a few keystrokes. For high-traffic projects, I have them bound to a single keystroke for instant switching. This change has been a game-changer from the mess of windows I used to have and the nightmare it was to find work I was doing and end up duplicating project work in two separate windows.

📝 NOTE: Some of my config comes straight from the course, and some of it has been extended to my liking.

Let’s take a quick look at how I am navigating through tmux on a day-to-day basis.

Sorry, your browser doesn't support embedded videos.

👆 Overview of how I navigate tmux

tmux ls #

Throughout this article, I have several recordings showing how I use manage sessions with my keybindings. I will often run a tmux ls command to highlight running sessions at various points to help guide the viewer.

ta #

my attach/session switch script

At the heart of my tmux navigation is a highly customized version of Chris’s tat script that I renamed ta. Many folks add this to their bashrc alias ta=tmux attach. Simply calling ta will do the same thing as shown below. If you’re in a tmux session, it does nothing, and if you’re not in one, it will attach you to the first one.

get the full script from GitHub.

Sorry, your browser doesn't support embedded videos.

👆 attaching to a session by default

In my ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc I add the ta command to keep myself in a tmux session at all times. Whenever I open my terminal, I am automatically dropped into a tmux session, but if I am opening a split while in tmux it’s smart enough to know not to nest tmux sessions.

ta

Another article can dive into my ta command. This one is more about the methodology, workflow, and keybindings to get me there. It’s available in my script.

but there’s more #

gettin fuzzy

Give it a directory, and a fzy dropdown will let you choose a subdirectory to start your session in, and name the session after that directory.

ta ~/git

🔥 Bonus, use direnv to automatically set settings, echo your git status, activate your environment or whatever else you need.

Sorry, your browser doesn't support embedded videos.

👆 give it a directory, it will ask for input to which project and start a new named session in that directory.

Note that starting from outside currently does not start in a split layout like it does when starting from within tmux. I am still playing with this, but generally, I want my terminal session to be plain when I first start my terminal. I usually am starting work after the first default session.

🤔 I still use both fzy and fzf. It probably doesn’t make sense to use both, but I am currently giving fzy a try.

prefix+w #

tmux choose-tree

By default, tmux comes with a tmux choose-tree command bound to prefix+w, which opens in full screen. The upper section of the screen will show every window opened. While selected, you can show the splits in each window by hitting l, or fold it with h. You can search for a session name by hitting /.

Sorry, your browser doesn't support embedded videos.

# ~/.tmux.conf

# expanded to show all splits
bind s choose-tree
# simpler window to show only sessions
bind S choose-session

Keybindings in choose-tree/choose-session #

The default keybindings of the tmux choose-tree and choose-session that I use are listed below. J/K are very intuitive, but I just learned about h,l,/. When I do use one of these, the / (search) can be super helpful to find sessions/windows faster.

action	key
fold	h
unfold	l
up	k
down	j
search	/

prefix+c-w prefix+c-g #

open a project

I have set up to make it easy to open my non-work projects (in my ~/git directory) and my work projects (in my ~/work directory). I bound prefix+c-g and prefix+c-w to open a new session in their respective directories. I like mapping common prefix commands with control to keep my pinky mashed on that control key.

# ~/.tmux.conf

bind C-w new-window -n "work-session-picker" "ta ~/work"
bind C-g new-window -n "git-session-picker" "ta ~/git"

Sorry, your browser doesn't support embedded videos.

prefix+c-j #

jump to session

Now that I have ta rocking with a good create or attach setup, I am rarely toggling through a list of running sessions, but I am doing it with prefix+c-j when I do it. Keeping my finger on control and pressing <space>+j. This keybinding uses fzf to fuzzy match to an existing session and attach.

bind C-j new-window -n "session-switcher" "tmux list-sessions | sed -E 's/:.*$//' | grep -v \"^$(tmux display-message -p '#S')\$\" | fzf --reverse | xargs tmux switch-client -t"

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M-N M-P #

next/prev

Next and Previous sessions. This is super handy when working with under 3 sessions to be able to cycle through sessions holding shift+alt and pressing n or p.

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tkill #

time to clean up

It’s easy to get a long crufty list of sessions running throughout the day. Typically this is not too bad on system resources compared to running vscode in every working project, but it does make it more challenging to manage and wade through the sessions list. I use a handy shell alias that’s been in my zshrc for quite some time.

alias tkill="for s in \$(tmux list-sessions | awk '{print \$1}' | rg ':' -r '' | fzy); do tmux kill-session -t \$s; done;"

I don’t have this one set up with a nice hotkey, but it works for my fingers. I often pop open a lower split(M-s), run tkill, and close (M-x).

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Last Session #

back

While M-n and M-p work well with a small, focused number of sessions, I often end up with too many sessions open, and it’s not efficient to remember a double M-N followed by a triple M-P to get back and forth. Most often, I want to get between two sessions quickly, no matter what the order is.

bind -n M-B switch-client -l
bind -n M-b switch-client -l

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Once I get two sessions back to back, I can switch between them with insane speed and precision.

More Precision #

one keystroke

The final layer of precision is for my most current project. I need to get to these with a single keystroke. These are bound to a set of keybindings that were readily available, just above the home row.

bind C-t new-session -A -s todo "cd ~/work/todo && nvim -O backlog.md doing.md done.md"
bind -n M-i new-session -A -s ww3 "cd ~/git/ww3/ && nvim"
bind -n M-o new-session -A -s images_waylonwalker_com "cd ~/git/images.waylonwalker.com/ && nvim"

Sorry, your browser doesn't support embedded videos.

These few directories are always at my fingertips, encouraging me to keep better notes

And yes, I did steal this last one from Harpoon-man By The Way.

Hub and Spoke #

M-i M-b

I have really been digging this hub and spoke workflow where I am rocking away on a project hit M-I, take some notes then hit M-b to get back to where I was.

Model of my current workflow

Example #

Here is an example of how I use the hub and spoke model to get to notes on my blog and back to my project quickly.

Sorry, your browser doesn't support embedded videos.

Example workflow #

open tmux session with ta
prefix+c-g start work in a project using a fuzzy matcher
M-t over to my todo list
M-b back to my project
M-i to my blog to look up notes/make notes
M-b back to my project
prefix+c-g start work in another project using a fuzzy matcher
M-t over to my todo list
M-b back to my project
prefix+c-j fuzzy back to the first project
M-b back to the second project

Please let me know your thoughts. @waylonwalker, this one took me a bit longer to put together with all of the animated gif’s, but I think it helps visually show how I navigate tmux every day.

If you liked it, give it a share and tag me on twitter. I don’t often ask but this article took a bit more to put together than my normal post.

Trim unused git branches

2021-05-07T09:47:24Z

Trim branches no longer on origin #

git remote prune origin --dry-run
git remote prune origin

Find branches already merged #

git checkout main
# list remote branches that have already been merged into main
git branch -r --merged
# list local branches that have already been merged into main
git branch --merged

How to compare two files in vim

2021-05-06T09:43:17Z

:vert diffsplit filetwo.py

:diffthis

:diffoff

:Gdiff main

Create a Virtual File Gallery with Symlinks

2021-05-05T08:23:33Z

Creating a directory that is a union of several directories can be achieved with a few symlinks at the command line.

Creating a Virtual File Gallery #

Here is how I am creating a virtual directory of all my projects that is a combination of both work and not-work projects. I am creating symlinks for every directory under ~/work and ~/git.

rm -rf ~/projects
mkdir ~/projects
ln -sf ~/work/* ~/projects
ln -sf ~/git/* ~/projects

⚠ Notice that first I am recreating the directory each time. This will ensure that any project that is deleted from their actual directory is removed from the virtual gallery.

Updating the gallery #

Since links are always kept up to date without any extra work, all the data is still in the same place it started. But as new directories are added to any project directory they will not be automatically added to the virtual gallery.

cron
bashrc/zshrc

If you’re concerned about system resources, you can add it to a cron job to run at a regular schedule that makes sense to you. For me, I just popped those 4 lines right in my ~/.zshrc. It’s a bit overkill, maybe bloat, but it runs in an impercieveable amount of time.

Automatically CD to the real directory #

When you cd into a ~/projects/my-proj directory, your $PWD will still be ~/projects/my-proj. I did not want this for my use case. I wanted to follow the symlink to the real directory. I found two options that worked for me.

alias cd='cd -P'
set -o physical

Add either of these to your .bashrc/.zshrc to follow symlinks to the actual directory.

📝 Docker Deep Dive - Notes

2021-04-23T09:41:29Z

https://www.hanselminutes.com/784/doing-open-source-with-brian-douglas

Play With Docker #

A handy way to try weird things in docker is using play-with-docker. You get a four hour session for free, after four hours everything will be deleted, but you can start a new session.

Installing Docker on Linux #

Installing on Ubuntu.

wget -qO- https://get.docker.com/ | sh

Running Docker commands without sudo #

In order to run docker commands without using sudo you need to add docker to your group.

sudo usermod -aG docker ubuntu

Architecture and Theory #

Container - Isolated area of an OS with resource usage limits applied.

Namespaces and Control Groups are hard, which is why containers were unusable by mortals before docker.

Namespaces #

Isolation

Each container looks and feels like a regular OS. It has its own eth0, users, kernel. These are completely isolated from every other container running on the system.

Namespaces are analogous to what Hypervisors do on hardware.

Process ID (pid)
Network (net)
Filesystem/mount (mnt)
Inter-proc comms (ipc)
UTS (uts)
User (usr)

Control Groups #

Resource usage limits

Live Substitution In Neovim

2021-01-04T00:00:00Z

Replacing text in vim can be quite frustrating especially since it doesn’t have live feedback to what is changing. Today I was watching Josh Branchaud’s Vim-Unalphabet series on Youtuve and realized that his vim was doing this and I had to have it.

https://twitter.com/_WaylonWalker/status/1346081617199198210

How to do it #

I had to do a bit of searching and found a great post from vimcasts that shows exactly how to get the live search and replace highlighting using inccomand

:h inccommand #

'inccommand' 'icm' string (default "")
   global

 "nosplit": Shows the effects of a command incrementally, as you type.
 "split"  : Also shows partial off-screen results in a preview window.

 Works for |:substitute|, |:smagic|, |:snomagic|. |hl-Substitute|

 If the preview is too slow (exceeds 'redrawtime') then 'inccommand' is
 automatically disabled until |Command-line-mode| is done.

Add this to your config #

I believe that this is a neovim only feature, add it into your ~/.config/nvim/init.vim file. You can see it in my dotfiles as well.

set inccommand=nosplit

See it in Action #

The Video that inspired this #

Check out Josh Branchaud’s great series on the Vim-Unalphabet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jMiYtXz2QA

Newsboat

2021-01-02T00:00:00Z

Web browsers are a black hole of productivity. I try to use them as little as possible when it is time to focus. I try to use help, ?, or ?? with ipython, or –help at the command line as much as possible. What about that time I am trying to see what my online friends are posting on their sites? I used to used google reader quite heavily before that was taken down.

Newsboat #

I am going to give a terminal rss reader a try for a bit and see how that goes for me. I have really struggled to get into an rss reader since google reader died.

installation #

I installed with the reccomended snap for Ubuntu.

sudo snap install newsboat

Adding feeds #

super simple

Running help for newsboat directed me towards their config files at the bottom.

❯ newsboat --help
newsboat r2.22
usage: /snap/newsboat/3849/usr/local/bin/newsboat [-i <file>|-e] [-u <urlfile>] [-c <cachefile>] [-x <command> ...] [-h]
    -e, --export-to-opml        export OPML feed to stdout
    -r, --refresh-on-start      refresh feeds on start
    -i, --import-from-opml=<file>   import OPML file
    -u, --url-file=<urlfile>    read RSS feed URLs from <urlfile>
    -c, --cache-file=<cachefile>    use <cachefile> as cache file
    -C, --config-file=<configfile>  read configuration from <configfile>
    -X, --vacuum            compact the cache
    -x, --execute=<command>...  execute list of commands
    -q, --quiet         quiet startup
    -v, --version           get version information
    -l, --log-level=<loglevel>  write a log with a certain loglevel (valid values: 1 to 6)
    -d, --log-file=<logfile>    use <logfile> as output log file
    -E, --export-to-file=<file> export list of read articles to <file>
    -I, --import-from-file=<file>   import list of read articles from <file>
    -h, --help          this help
        --cleanup           remove unreferenced items from cache

Files:
    - configuration:  /home/nic/snap/newsboat/3849/.newsboat/config
    - feed URLs:      /home/nic/snap/newsboat/3849/.newsboat/urls
    - cache:          /home/nic/snap/newsboat/3849/.newsboat/cache.db

Support at #newsboat at https://freenode.net or on our mailing list https://groups.google.com/g/newsboat
For more information, check out https://newsboat.org/

I just need to edit its urls file.

nvim ~/snap/newsboat/3849/.newsboat/urls

The Urls file is just a list of urls to rss feeds. Adding mine in allowed me to see all of my posts.

https://waylonwalker.com/rss.xml

Config #

I took most of my config from a blog post that I found by Evan Travers. It set some sane defaults to the reading width and vim keys.

# https://evantravers.com/articles/2020/04/15/reworking-my-rss-reading/
# Hide feeds where all the items are read.
show-read-feeds no

# Make the text width readable
text-width 50

# Use multiple threads to download all the news faster.
reload-threads 11

# browser ~/bin/newsboat-browser.sh
# browser "/usr/bin/brave-browser %u"

# unbind keys
unbind-key ENTER
unbind-key j
unbind-key k
unbind-key J
unbind-key K
unbind-key ^D
unbind-key ^U
unbind-key o
unbind-key g
unbind-key G

# bind keys - vim style
bind-key j down
bind-key k up
bind-key l open
bind-key h quit
bind-key ^D pagedown
bind-key ^U pageup
bind-key b toggle-source-view
bind-key U toggle-show-read-feeds
bind-key u show-urls
bind-key g home
bind-key G end
bind-key b open-in-browser-and-mark-read
bind-key B open-in-browser
bind-key i sort
bind-key I rev-sort

GUI Browser #

No matter how many different guides I tried I keedp getting error code 127 when trying to open-in-browser. Please let me know if you know how to fix this. For now I am just going to roll with it.

Here’s how it looks #

browsing a feed in newsboat

reading an article in newsboat

Find and Replace in the Terminal.

2020-11-12T05:00:00Z

grepr #

grepr() {grep -iRl "$1" | xargs sed -i "s/$1/$2/g"}

```bash
grepr() {grep -iRl "$1" | xargs sed -i "s/$1/$2/g"}

grepd #

grepd() {grep -iRl "$1" | xargs sed -i "/^$1/d"}

CocSearch #

:CocSearch published: false -g *.md

Creating Reusable Bash Scripts

2020-08-13T05:00:00Z

Bash is a language that is quite useful for automation no matter what language you write in. Bash can do so many powerful system-level tasks. Even if you are on windows these days you are likely to come across bash inside a cloud VM, Continuous Integration, or even inside of docker.

I have three techniques that help me write more composable bash scripts.

functions

Functions #

Break scripts down into reusable components

Functions in bash are quite simple. They are something that I wish I would have started using long ago. They make your code much more reusable. I often use them in my aliases as well since they can simplify the process and allow more flexibility.

syntax

#!/bin/sh
# hello_world
hello_world () {
    echo "hello world"
}

Source the file to load the function and run it from the terminal.

run it

source hello_world
hello_world

outputs

hello world

Arguments #

Make functions a little more flexible

Arguments and options are quite a bit more complex in bash. For now, we will focus on the basics which are not all that bad.

positional arguments #

easiest and most common to use

Positional arguments can be pulled out quite easily using $1 for the first one, $2 for the second, and so on.

note $0 is the command that was called. You will see this often used to find the command called to open up your current shell.

syntax

#!/bin/sh
# hello
hello () {
    echo "hello $1"

run it

source hello
hello Waylon

Now we have a function that accepts positional arguments and we can call it by passing things into it.

outputs

hello Waylon

More than one argument would be ignored since we are only looking at $1.

run it

source hello
hello Waylon Walker

outputs

hello Waylon

Just the same as before since we do not use the second argument.

All Arguments #

Bash has another special variable $@ that stores all arguments in one.

syntax

#!/bin/sh
# hello
hello () {
    echo "hello $@"
}

Just the same as before.

run it

source hello
hello Waylon Walker

Now the function will output all arguments that are passed into it since we are using the $@ variable.

outputs

hello Waylon Walker

Error Handling #

Super powers in a single line

The easiest and most common way to handle an error in bash is through the use of the logical operators && (and) and || (or).

Here I have a concrete example from earlier today. I was creating a bash script to run a python script from cron. The bash script is there to make sure that we have the python environment, activate it, and run. If it doesn’t have it, it should create it.

# creates the conda environment
create_env() {
    conda create -n "$1" python=3.8
    conda activate "$1"
    pip install -r requirements.txt
}


# checks if the conda environment exists
env_exists() {
conda info --envs | awk '{print $1}' | tail -n +3 | grep -w "$1" > /dev/null
}


# creates the conda environment if it doesn't exist
create_if () {
env_exists "$1" && echo "environment exists" || create_env "$1"
}

create_if my_env

If we look at the create_if function, it will check if the environment exists if there is a passing status code 0, then it will run echo "environment exists" otherwise it will run create_env $1.

note Inside of env_exists grep will look for whole words if there is a match it will give a status code 0 if it finds a match and not 0 if there is no match.

main script #

_if __name__ == " __main__"_

The last thing I want to discuss is making a bash script both runnable and sourceable. This makes it so that you can source filename.sh and run each function individually, or bash filename.sh to run the script. This is a similar concept to if __name__ == " __main__" from python.

I did try this from bash and zsh with success. The following is an example that would pass all arguments into a main function.

syntax

if [["${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" == "${0}" ]]; then
    main "$@"
fi

Extending the example above that created a python example if necessary we can create the env if necessary, activate the environment, and run the script.

syntax

if [["${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" == "${0}" ]]; then
create_if my_env
conda activate my_env
python script.py
fi

Using this syntax to run our “main” functions will allow us to both runs the script or source the script to utilize the functions that we created.

New Machine for developing Tests with TestProject.io

2020-07-25T05:00:00Z

Today I setup a new machine on Digital Ocean to use with TestProject.io, Here are my installation notes.

apt update && apt upgrade -y

apt install zsh
chsh zsh
sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)"
curl -fsSL https://starship.rs/install.sh | bash
echo 'eval "$(starship init zsh)"' >> ~/.zshrc

# python
sudo apt update
sudo apt install python3-pip -y
echo 'alias python=python3' >> ~/.zshrc
echo 'alias pip=pip3' >> ~/.zshrc

# pipx
apt install python3-venv
pip install pipx
pipx install black
pipx install shell-functools
pip install ipython


# docker
sudo apt update
sudo apt install apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl gnupg-agent software-properties-common
curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo apt-key add -
sudo add-apt-repository "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu $(lsb_release -cs) stable"
sudo apt update
sudo apt install docker-ce

# docker-compose
sudo curl -L "https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/1.25.5/docker-compose-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m)" -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

# configure git
git config --global user.name "Waylon Walker"
git config --global user.email waylon@waylonwalker.com

# fzf
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/junegunn/fzf.git ~/.fzf
~/.fzf/install

# forgit
git clone https://github.com/wfxr/forgit ~/.forgit
echo ". ~/.forgit/forgit.plugin.zsh" >> ~/.zshrc

# ag
apt install silversearcher-ag

# bat
apt install bat
echo "alias cat=batcat" >> ~/.zshrc

# testproject.io tokens
echo 'export TP_AGENT_ALIAS="Digital Ocean Agent"' >>" ~/.zshrc
echo "export TP_AGENT_API_KEY=<your-key> >>" ~/.zshrc
echo "export TP_DEV_TOKEN=<your-token> >>" ~/.zshrc

envsubst < .github/ci/docker-compose.yml > docker-compose.yml

# .github/ci/docker-compose.yml
version: "3.1"
services:
  testproject-agent:
    image: testproject/agent:latest
    container_name: testproject-agent
    depends_on:
      - chrome
      - firefox
    environment:
      TP_API_KEY: "${TP_API_KEY}"
      TP_AGENT_ALIAS: "GitHub Action Agent"
      TP_AGENT_TEMP: "true"
      TP_SDK_PORT: "8686"
      CHROME: "chrome:4444"
      CHROME_EXT: "localhost:5555"
      FIREFOX: "firefox:4444"
      FIREFOX_EXT: "localhost:6666"
    ports:
    - "8585:8585"
    - "8686:8686"
  chrome:
    image: selenium/standalone-chrome
    volumes:
      - /dev/shm:/dev/shm
    ports:
    - "5555:4444"
  firefox:
    image: selenium/standalone-firefox
    volumes:
      - /dev/shm:/dev/shm
    ports:
    - "6666:4444"

docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml

Out of Space

2020-02-01T06:00:00Z

This morning I logged into my machine and was nearly out of space

64GB miniconda3!
5GB conda cache
4GM pip cache
34GB docker

Find it #

These are the commands that I often use to reclaim space. Its so easy to fill up small vm’s in the cloud, or in my case today let your dev machine go way too long without a good cleanup.

Show Remaining Space on Drives #

This shows us where to start and gives a baseline of how much space we have reclaimed.

df -h

show largest files in current directory #

Next keep drilling into directories that are big and running this command to see whats big inside of it. When you find somethign that you are willing to part with rm -rf <directory> it and check df -h to see if you have enough reclaimed yet.

du . -h --max-depth=1

Honestly I rarely bother unless the directory is in the GB’s of space. A super simple filter for that is to just grep for G.

du . -h --max-depth=1 | grep G

conda #

How Many? #

As a first baseline lets see how many enviroments we are starting with. I started with 71. Yeah I have had this machine for 2 years, and dont regularly remove them.

conda info --envs | tail -n +2 | wc -l

bash

Lets batch it out #

We are devs here surely we can automate this issue! The following four lines will generate a list of existing conda environments, edit them with vim, remove the remaining ones, then remove the text file we created to remove from.

Make sure that you only keep names of environments that you want to remove in conda_envs_to_remove.txt and delete the environment names you want to keep.

conda info --envs | tail -n +2 | cut -d ' ' -f1 > conda_envs_to_remove.txt
vim conda_envs_to_remove.txt
cat ~/.conda_envs_remove | tr '\n' '\0' | xargs -l -0 conda remove --all -y -n
rm conda_envs_to_remove.txt

📝 Side note #

When I am creating one of these complicated bash pipelines including xargs I generally print out the command first and make sure that it does what I want. The following command will test the above script before doing dangerous things!

cat ~/.conda_envs_remove | tr '\n' '\0' | xargs -l -0 echo "conda remove --all -y -n "

Cache #

If your feeling really strained for space, you can rm -rf ~/.cache. Personally I like the improved speed of installing everything… obviously I install a lot of new environments.

Docker #

For more information read this article, https://docs.docker.com/config/pruning/. I have all of the images that I want pushed remotely so I just dumped everything with the following command.

docker system prune
docker system prune --volumes

Running these two sets of commands cleared up about 70GB of space for me with very little effort on my behalf. I hope others find the first command helpful to batch remove many conda environments at once.

Supercharge Zsh Startup

2020-01-03T06:00:00Z

I have been using oh-my-zsh successfully for about 2 years now. But lately my startup time has been really bothersome. It has grown to the point where it was taking about 5.5s to startup a shell! This is ok if I am going to spend some time in here for awhile and do some work that benefits from all of the autocompletions, plugins, and shortcuts that oh-my-zsh brings. But to only jump in to run a handful of commands is infuriating.

📑 My Setup #

I believe the real issue is io speed on wsl. I have some remote servers with similar configs that are 10x faster or more, loading in 100s of milliseconds rather than seconds. Sourcing all of the individual plugin files are just too much for it.

💨 How Fast can it be #

Quick side note: your zsh config is controled by your ~/.zshrc file. This file can source other files, load plugins, or run literally anything.

Time the initial time

time zsh -c exit

Move your ~/.zshrc config file.

mv ~/.zshrc ~/.zshrc-back

Time the fastest startup possible with nothing in your ~/.zshrc config file.

time zsh -c exit

Move your ~/.zshrc back

mv ~/.zshrc-back ~/.zshrc

🕵️‍♂️Profile your startup time #

It is possible to profile your zsh startup time by adding zmodload zsh/zprof to the start of your ~/.zshrc file and zprof at the end. This was unsuccessfull for me. I ended up just backing up ~/.zshrc file, then deleting half of it to see where the hot spots were. I found that two places that were really hot for me. One I was inadvertantly setting git and npm settings everytime that didn’t need to be set everytime. That was an easy 2s gain. Another easy 3s gain was removing oh-my-zsh.

# ~/.zshrc
zmodload zsh/zprof
...
..
.
zprof

😭But I really like oh-my-zsh #

without all the bells and whistle that oh-my-zsh provided zsh became lightning fast to load, but incredibly boring. It was also very painful to manually type out everything that it autocompleted or aliased all the time. Next I headed down a path to get all of that functionality back without sacrificing load time.

Without oh-my-zsh, zsh became incredibly boring.

🔌 Plugin Managers #

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

oh-my-zsh
zplugin
zgen

There are a number of plugin managers for zsh, I tried each of the ones listed above, but found that as I approached a nice setup that I liked the load time would creep up above the 2s mark each time. I would turn certain plugins on and off, try different plugin managers, before realizing that I had spent enough time on this problem and it was going to be time to settle on fast startup or functionality.

⚖ Finding Balance #

Semi-lazy loading

Photo by Jeppe Hove Jensen on Unsplash

After struggling to get all of the features I wanted with a fast load time, I decided to only load what I needed upon startup. Next I created a simple alias that loads in zgen and all of the plugins I want. By doing this I get two main benefits. Obviously I get a faster starup time by loading less. I got my startup time down to about 0.25s.

# ~/.zshrc
p () {
zgen load zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions
....
..
.
}

⚡ Fast Loading #

I really like the fast startup time, because sometimes I am only loading up zsh to run a handful of commands that dont need much in the way of plugins

simple commands that need 💨 blazing start speed

any single easy to type command, these are my common commands that I will open a terminal in my editor and just need to run quick.

vim
git add . && git commit && git push
sh my_script.sh
make build
bake build
pytest
gatsby develop
npm i
npm update
pip install
ipython

The second benefit was that I can continue typing while plugins are loading.

>Prompt #

After removing oh-my-zsh the first thing that I missed was the themes that it provided. I went through a number of them and the one that seemed to have the smallest effect on performance and everything I needed was starship. It’s a really fast prompt written in rust. The biggest thing that I needed to have that other prompts were misssing was conda environments. I live much of my work life running python from various conda environments and it is crutial that I can see what environment I am in at all times.

💰 Bonus #

I applied the same logic to neovim and achieved similar results. Again it just had too many plugins loading on startup for simple tasks. I ended up taking a shortcut and load any heavy plugins upon NerdTreeToggle. I dont really use NERDTree that much, but when I do its for more than just a quick edit.

# ~/.config/nvim/init.vim
Plug 'valloric/youcompleteme', {'do': './install.py', 'on': 'NERDTreeToggle'}

📝 Bash Notes

2019-09-08T05:00:00Z

Bash is super powerful.

File System Full #

Show Remaining Space on Drives

df -h

show largest files in current directory

du . -h --max-depth=1

Move files then symlink them

mkdir /mnt/mounted_drive
mv ~/bigdir /mnt/mounted_drive
ln -s /mnt/mounted_drive/bigdir ~/bigdir

Fuzzy One Liners #

a() {source activate "$(conda info --envs | fzf | awk '{print $

edit in vim

vf() { fzf | xargs -r -I % $EDITOR % ;}

cat a file

vf() { fzf | xargs -r -I % $EDITOR % ;}

bash execute

bf() { bash "$(fzf)" }

git add

gadd() { git status -s | fzf -m | awk '{print $2}' | xargs git add && git status -s}

git reset

greset() { git status -s |  fzf -m | awk '{print $2}' |xargs git reset && git status -s}

Kill a process

fkill() {kill $(ps aux | fzf | awk '{print($2)}')}

Finding things #

Files #

fd-find is amazing for finding files, it even respects your .gitignore file 😲. Install with apt install fd-find.

fd md

ag -g python

find . -n "*.md"

++Vanilla Bonus

Content #

** show matching text **

ag python

grep -iR Python

++Vanilla Bonus

** show file names only **

ag -l python

grep -iRl python

++Vanilla Bonus

Recursively Replace text #

agr() {ag -l "$1" | xargs sed -i "s/$1/$2/g"}

++Vanilla Bonus

grepr() {grep -iRl "$1" | xargs sed -i "s/$1/$2/g"}

Extending **agr** or **grepr**

There are so many options inside of grep, ag, and sed that you could many an enormous amount of these if you really wanted to, but I like to keep it simple. These cover 90% of my usage. If I wanted to change something in the second half I would just paste in this command and edit it. More often though I want to limit the input, say only replace word1 to word2 inside of markdown files.

Limited Scope

fd md | xargs argr python python3

find . -n "*.md" | xargs grepr python python3

++Vanilla Bonus

Large Refactor At The Command Line

I use these replace commands heavily when doing large refactorings.

conditionally configure #

I like this one when there is not a good cli into config files and I need to replace something like a true to false if the value is in the config and append to the config if its not.

grepr() {
    # replaces first string with second string inside file from third argument
    # example:
    #   grepr "allow_conda_downgrades:.*" "allow_conda_downgrades: true" ~/.condarc
    if grep -xq $1 $3
    then
        sed -i "s|$1|$2|g" $3
    else
        echo "$2" >> $3
    fi
}

Watch the time #

watch -n 1 date

++Vanilla Bonus

with figlet

watch -n 1 bash -c "date | figlet"

watch a function #

run () {
date
aws s3 sync $BUCKET .
}
export -f run
watch -n 10 run

if conda environment does not exist create it #

conda info --envs | grep my_env && echo "my_env environment is installed" || conda create -n my_env python=3.8 -y
source activate my_env

Rename multiple files

more info from linuxize

for f in *.png; do
   mv ${f} prefix-${f}
done

using the rename command #

sudo apt install rename

rename "s/.GIF/.gif/" *.GIF

convert all files in a directory to unix #

dos2unix **/*

recursively remove all whitespace from .py files #

find **/*.py -type f -exec sed -i 's/ *$//' '{}' ';'

recursively autopep8 #

find . -name '*.py' -exec autopep8 --in-place '{}' \;

make bash script a runnable command #

include a shebang

#! /bin/bash

chmod

chmod +x /usr/local/bin/my_script

accept positional input

#! /bin/bash
input=$1
echo input

Using pyp #

pipx install pyp

replacement for cut #

❯ python -m http.server 5000 &
[1] 8574

✦ ❯ Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 5000 (http://0.0.0.0:5000/) ...

✦ ❯ ps aux | grep "python -m http.server" | grep -v grep | pyp 'line.split()[1]' | xargs kill
[1]  + terminated  python -m http.server 5000

replacement for wc #

conda info --envs | pyp 'len(lines) - 3 # account for header and base'

print contents of shell function #

declare -f <function-name>

batch rename files #

for f in *.jpeg; do
    mv -- "$f" "${f%.jpeg}.jpg"
done

convert markdown files to reveal.js #

https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/wiki/Using-pandoc-to-produce-reveal.js-slides{.hoverlink} install pandoc

apt install pandoc

setup

wget https://github.com/hakimel/reveal.js/archive/master.tar.gz
tar -xzvf master.tar.gz
mv reveal.js-master reveal.js

convert

pandoc -t revealjs -s -o myslides.html myslides.md -V revealjs-url=https://unpkg.com/reveal.js@3.9.2/

Render Markdown at the command line #

Glow is a terminal markdown renderer written in go. There iis a prebuilt binary that can simply be unzipped and executed to render markdow.

wget https://github.com/charmbracelet/glow/releases/download/v0.2.0/glow_0.2.0_linux_x86_64.tar.gz
tar -xzf glow_0.2.0_linux_x86_64.tar.gz
chmod +x glow
sudo mv glow /usr/bin

glow <filename>

Autocomplete for click applications #

see the docs for more details

Autocomplete for non click python cli’s #

shtab https://github.com/iterative/shtab

Ensure functions reset context #

project_log() {
   _dir=$(pwd)
   _project_log() {
      cd ~/projects/project
      git log
   }
   _project_log $@ && cd $_dir || cd $_dir
}

Finding Files #

rg --files . | grep bash
rg --files . | rg bash
rg --files . | ag bash
rg --files . | fzf
rg -e 'hook' -g '*.md'
rg -e 'hook' -g '*.py'

rg --files-with-matches
rg --files-without-match

mu-repo #

# installation
pip install mu-repo

## register repos
mu register --recursive
mu list

# run git commands
mu status --short
mu diff -U0 --color | bat

# run shell commands
mu sh $(grep -iRl "KEDRO_GID=0" | xargs sed -i "s/KEDRO_GID=0/KEDRO_GID=5/g")

Maintianing multiple git repos with mu-repo

See the full post for mu-repo for more

mu unregister all #

I ran into some issues with mu unregister * before, but this seems to work everywhere.

mu list | tail -n +3 | xargs -I {} mu unregister {}

mu register all repos that have an rg match #

Add all repos that have a versionspec of 3.7 in them.

rg --hidden=true 'versionSpec:.*.3.7' -l | xargs -I {} mu register {}

xrandr #

xrandr -s 1920x1080

Posts tagged: linux Archive

stow local ignore

Reference #

💭 No one under 18 installs Linux

💭 POV: You install Clawdbot on VPS - YouTube

setup bambu-studio in distrobox

💭 Microsoft keeps losing - YouTube

💭 2025 The Year Of The Linux Desktop - YouTube

💭 "Pacman is currently in use, please wait."

tar over ssh

bash timestamp

💭 DHH on X: "Rewiring your muscle memory for copy/paste when you...

💭 Omarchy is on the move

Dolphin Remote Storage Previews

💭 An Ode To My 10-Year-Old Thinkpad T440

💭 2025-07-10 Notes

💭 Vimothée Chalamet shares his new favorite shell command from a...

fc

Rcap of how !! works #

fc enters the chat #

Shell History #

Up Arrow #

💭 Quickshell

💭 Stop Complaining About Ubuntu...Just Switch To Arch Already! -...

💭 I was wrong - YouTube

gpg setup for kdewallet

brightnessctl adjust screen brightness

💭 Arch Wizard Brodie Robertson vs My Mac Life - Will He Convert ...

unset multiple environment variables

i3lock on AwesomeWM

Fancy #

💭 Command Line | gitignore.io / docs

Linux Is About Choice

Taken over by apathetic interests #

Corporate backing is OK #

FOSS hardware #

Choice #

Infinite Linux #

Immutable Linux #

Freedom #

Fin #

💭 The Worst OS - YouTube

💭 The Worst OS - YouTube

backup distrobox image

Use pbpaste for clean shell history

aptitude why

Install aptitude #

Why tzdata #

configure timezone

Why tzdata #

The solution, configure tzdata #

bc

REPL #

Vim #

💭 Releases · bootandy/dust

nvim-manager

Why #

How is nvim manager any better #

So all these versions in ~/.config #

So what do I need to do? #

Install nvim-manager #

Install your own dotfiles #

Ubuntu Container Speedrun #

Give it a Star #

💭 Why You Should Game on Linux (feat. GloriousEggroll of Nobara)...

💭 curl with partial files | daniel.haxx.se

💭 Hybrid Cloud Show – Episode 20 - YouTube

setting up ucore-zfs

Immutable is the future #

The Hardware #

Get Password Hash #

Get SSH Pub Key #

ucore-autorebase.butane #

Creating an ignition file #

Getting zfs #

ZFS #

connecting nfs #

💭 Ubuntu Summit 2024 | UMU - A unified tool for easily running y...

💭 Dedicated Servers | Intel Servers | AMD Servers - Dedicated Ho...

💭 Talking with Typecraft - YouTube

`fc` enters the chat #