🍚 Tina's Dotfiles

What are Dotfiles?

A dotfile is a commonly misused word to talk about configuration files, because configuration files often begin with a dot (.), e.g., .bashrc.

Why publishing them?

1. For personal use: Having them available on GitHub helps me syncing my configuration files across devices, making me faster to use a new machine. It also serves as a back-up if anything goes wrong.
2. To share knowledge: Sometimes manpages aren't enough. Seeing how other people use and configure their software can help you understand what are the possible scenarios for a program, or help you learn stuff you didn't know.
3. To help beginners getting started: My dotfiles are voluntarly unoponionated. Nothing in my dotfiles should reflect my personal use-case, nothing is tied to how or where I store files or to my personal habits. This might help people not advanced enough getting a beautiful desktop base.

Screenshots showcase

Current

Olders

2019-06-10

Nothing 

The application launcher: Rofi

The ubiquitous editor: Vim

2019-04-19

Nothing 

Vim, Nemo and Neofetch

Just Ulauncher

Twitter and MPV

Quick setup

1. Clone this repository somewhere you won't move it. I store it in ~/Repositories/Tina-otoge/Dotfiles.
2. Go to your ~/.config directory.
3. Create symlinks of the configuration folder from the softwares you want, e.g., ln -sf ../Repositories/skielred/Dotfiles/i3 . (maybe do backups first)
4. Create additional symlinks for softwares that don't store their configuration in ~/.config.

cd
ln -sf .config/bash/bashrc .bashrc
ln -sf .config/zsh/zshrc .zshrc
ln -sf .config/x11/Xresources .Xresources
# etc...

The -f flag for ln will overwrite files with the same name.

Tips

Extending the packages repositories on Fedora

Default Fedora packages policy is to authorize strictly free software. There are softwares which are free (doesn't cost money) but don't release all of their source code publicly. And you may want some of those softwares directly from your package manager.

RPMFusion is a very popular repository (made of multiple big user-maintained repositories). You will find a lot of softwares in it such as Steam. Installing RPMFusion

Fedora also has a user-maintained repositories system called copr. This is similar to ArchLinux's AUR. You have to enable a user's repository, then you can install a package from it as if you were trying to install it normally.

Example:

dnf copr enable user/repo
dnf install package

Notable copr repositories I have enabled:

dnf copr enable fuhrmann/i3-gaps # i3 fork with sexy gaps between windows

The Fedora repo is so complete that I haven't touched any copr in a long time.

Avoid massive plugins distributions

If you want to build up knowledge about the softwares you use, and master them, avoid things like oh-my-zsh, oh-my-fish or SpaceVim. Even though they can seem appealing, you'll most likely be able to achieve the same features they have by manually picking up and installing plugins or adding a few lines of configuration. But with the benefit of knowing what changes you made from the default configuration and what they do exactly.

Use Flatpak when it makes sense

Flatpak is freedesktop's solution to standardized app distribution for Linux, and is endorsed and fairly integrated in Entreprise Linux' family of distros.

Compared to the alternatives (AppImage, snap, manually installing tarballs), it has major benefits and no apparent drawbacks. One of its core features is to containerize apps and using a permission system to only allow what the app actually needs (restrict filesystem access, network access, etc, similar to Android). It also has a working dependency system, mitigating duplication of libraries.

I recommend using it for userland applications, things such as Steam, Discord, GIMP, Slack, make sense as a Flatpak.

The list will grow as more useful tips comes to my mind.

Softwares recommendation

In the terminal

Software	Purpose	Dotfile?	Do I use it?	Notes
Alacritty	Terminal emulator	✔️	✔️	A GPU-accelerated terminal.
Kitty	Terminal emulator	✔️	❌	A GPU-accelerated terminal, dropped it because of an issue that causes it to pause when not in the active monitor.
urxvt	Terminal emulator	✔️	❌	Fastest terminal emulator I've tried. Only emulator I know of which runs at this speed, noticeable on programs with lots of frame updates such as music visualizers. It can be configured through Perl extensions. Stopped using it because it relies on xrdb and I wanted to stop using it.
Bash	Shell	✔️	❌	You should learn it at least for scripting purpose, as it is present in a lot of systems, it's a reliable way to write portable scripts.
Zsh	Shell	✔️	✔️	Similar and compatible to Bash but with a lot of very useful improvements.
Vim	Text or code editor	✔️	✔️	I use it for everything. I live in Vim 24h/7j. Btw do Escape then type :q! to force quit it, hope I saved your day.
Git	Version control software	✔️	✔️	I use Git to version control everything I do, from small coding projects to my phone's contacts address book. Way too powerful and simple to use.
neofetch	Flexing tool	✔️	✔️	The mandatory script to run in a terminal window before taking a screenshot of your desktop.
htop	Process manager	✔️	✔️	Equivalent of Windows' Task Manager. Use it to track down which applications use a lot of resources with the ability to kill them from the manager.
ranger	CLI file browser	✔️	❌	Used to use it, but I started to do a lot of complicating file browsing tasks such as using network locations, I needed a GUI tool. Still dope and very sexy to browse from your terminal, I highly recommend giving it a try.

On the desktop

Software	Purpose	Dotfile?	Do I use it?	Notes
GNOME	Desktop environment	❌	✔️	After using i3/sway for almost 4 years I decided that I wanted my desktop to look like an actual OS. Significantly bigger RAM usage though.
PaperWM	Tiling-like workflow for GNOME	❌	✔️	When migrating to GNOME I wanted to keep a tiling-based workflow. PaperWM's workflow is very close to tiling wms'.
Vimix	Icon theme	❌	✔️	Sleek looking icons.
Orchis (light-compact)	GTK theme	❌	✔️	Sleek looking GTK theme.
i3	Tiling window manager	✔️ (i3-gaps)	❌	The perfect window manager. Fast, simple to learn and configure. Lots of possibilities.
i3-gaps	i3 fork	✔️	❌	i3 but with the ability to configure gaps between windows. Makes everything 100 times sexier.
sway	i3 clone for Wayland	✔️	❌	Wayland is the newest, more secure, display protocol for Linux desktops.
polybar	Status bar	✔️	✔️	Easy to configure and to make pretty status bar.
i3bar	Status bar	❌	✔️	i3's natively supported status bar.
rofi		Application launcher	✔️	❌
Ulauncher	Application launcher	❌	✔️	Good looking application launcher with a web-based settings interface. I wrote an extension to run terminal commands from it, with auto-complete support.
LightDM	Display manager	✔️	❌	Lightweight display manager. The display manager is the program that greets you and ask you to log in, with the possibity to pick between the different desktop softwares installed.
Aether	A theme for LightDM Webkit2	✔️	❌	An amazing looking theme for LightDM.
compton	Compositor	✔️	❌	A compositor is a program that adds shadows, transparency and effects to the desktop windows. Think shader but for your desktop.

Utilities

Software	Purpose	Dotfile?	Do I use it?	Notes
GNOME Tweaks	Advanced configuration for GNOME	❌	✔️	Allow customizing GNOME beyond what's intended. Useful to control some advanced options and manage themes and extensions.
maim	Screenshot tool	✔️ (i3 keybinds)	❌	Simple and efficient screenshot tool. I had less problems with it than with scrot. See my i3 config to see how I use it (Print key and Shift+Print bindings).
youtube-dl	Websites wrapper/CLI tool	❌	✔️	Download or stream media from almost any video service existing on Earth. From, of course, YouTube, to many less known sites and even music sites such as SoundCloud. youtube-dl "$playlist_url" -x --audio-format=mp3.
Fusuma	Touchpad gestures	✔️	❌	Must have if you use a laptop and a desktop environment without touch gestures. Bind gestures such as swiping with 3 fingers to commands. Most common use case is previous/next page by swiping left/right.
Crescent	Application entries generator	✔️	✔️	A program I made to generate Desktrop Entries easily.
ImageMagick	Image editing library/CLI tool	❌	✔️	You must learn to use it. It's very useful and powerful. The simplest tasks you'll want to learn is converting between formats. It's as simple as convert from_image.png to_image.jpg.
ffmpeg	Video processing library/CLI tool	❌	✔️	Same reasons. You'll be doing ffmpeg -i from_video.flv to_video.mp4 quite often.
peerflix	Torrent streaming CLI tool	❌	✔️	A tool to download a torrent in order and stream it to your video player.

Applications

Software	Purpose	Dotfile?	Do I use it?	Notes
feh	Image viewer	❌	✔️	Stupid and simple image viewer. No actual GUI. Just opens media in a window, controls can be done through keyboard. Can also be used to set a wallpaper.
mpv	Media player	✔️	✔️	Stupid and simple media player. No actual GUI. Just opens media in a window, controls can be done through keyboard. Can integrate with youtube-dl mpv --no-video https://twitch.tv/monstercat.
Nemo	File browser	❌	❌	Nemo is the file browser made for and by the guys of Linux Mint. It's a fork of the file browser called Nautilus, it's slightly prettier.
Firefox	Internet browser	❌	✔️	Fast. Containers support (separate history/data per site). Sync. Add-ons support on mobile.
Chrome/Chromium	Internet browser	❌	✔️	Smooth performances. Fake app mode (launch any website without titlebar/buttons), perfect to create pseudo-webapps for Twitter, TweetDeck, or other sites.

The list will grow as more softwares that deserve to be recommended comes to my mind.

Need help?

Maybe open an issue or ask me on Twitter @Tina_otoge or Discord Tina#1998.