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What I Use 2018

ยท 3 min read

Inspired by usesthis.com I decided to share my current computer setup.

Hardware

After much deliberation between the 2018 Dell XPS 13, Huawei Matebook X Pro, Lenovo X1, I decided on a lesser known computer namely the ThinkPenguin y=mx+b or if you want to get technical the Clevo N141WU. Mine is configured with an intel core i7-8550U, with a single stick of 16GB DDR4 2400MHz Crucial Ram (with a spare slot), and a Samsung 970 EVO NVMe M.2 SSD.

Operating System

I use [Debian] linux, this is the only OS installed on my computer. If something breaks I need to figure out how to fix it or I won't have a computer to use, this an excellent motivator ;)

As a learning exercise I installed only the basics to necessary to boot, then installed and configured each component individually.

Window Manager

I use Calm Window Manager, which is the default window manager for OpenBSD. The man page for cwm is well written, I've customized a few things in my .cwmrc file

Compositor

I am using compton for transparent colors and fading when opening or closing windows. This program hasn't been updated in a while but it's working beautifully for now.

Terminal

I am using st from suckless.org. This is included in the Debian stable repo, but to get the most out of it you should compile it yourself from source. The trick I learned here is apt-get build-dep packagename. A huge time saver when you are trying to find all the miscellaneous libraries necessary to compile said package from source.

Fonts

I am using two truetype fonts.

Font Awesome 4 for displaying icons in the status bar and mononoki as my everything else monospaced font

Wallpaper

feh with the --bg-fill option. I get my backgrounds from unsplash.com

Other Software

Programs I use daily

  • Rofi (Application Launcher)
  • xbindkeys (Key Mapping)
  • xsecurelock (Screen Lock)
  • pass (Password Manager)
  • Firefox
  • Spotify
  • vim

Status Bar

bar by LemonBoy with TTF font support. A bash script that pipes information to be displayed, updated every 2 seconds

Backing up my scripts and dotfiles

GNU stow and github

The next time I decide to re-install nix and load my dotfiles, I can simply type:

git pull https://manila.github.com/dotfiles ~/dotfiles && cd ~/dotfiles && stow .

or for my scripts:

git pull https://manila.github.com/bin ~/bin

My Dotfiles

You can find my dotfiles here from github