Personal
How I Setup
My laptop is running Bedrock Linux, a meta-ditribution of Linux. It is currently hijacking Fedora, but I also have strata for Artix and Gentoo. I generally use OpenRC as my init system which starts Artix as my primary strata, but I also have systemd which starts up Fedora with a KDE desktop. Bedrock allows me to use Pacman, DNF, and Portage using the wonderful pmm, but I do also occasionally get software from the mighty AUR, and to do so I use Paru. The rest of my software is in the list below.
Before starting the big list, note that you can find all of my dot files in this repo on my github.
I use River 0.4.8 as my main Wayland compositor. River separates the role of the compositor and the window manager, unlike most modern Wayland compositors. As such, I use Argen as my actual window manager and Channel as my input manager. Argen is based around workspaces, but any particular window can be attached to multiple workspaces, or none at all! I manage the workspaces using shell scripts and Fuzzel.
For a lightning round of my desktop utilites:
I use Tofi to as my app launcher. Tofi is fast and works well with waybar, I don’t have much more to say on it.
I use awww to manage my wallpaper, although I don’t do anything fancy with it.
I use Waybar with an almost-deault configuration to display all my statuses. I plan to update the look eventually, but have not done so yet.
I use swayidle and swaylock to manage autolocking on my laptop.
For browsing, I primarily use Waterfox, a fork of firefox. Waterfox offers increased privacy compared to Firefox, while not breaking as much functionality as browsers like LibreWolf. I also use Brave on my phone for certain tasks Waterfox is less suited for, but I prefer to stay out of the Chromium ecosystem.
HexChat is my IRC client, and it works very well for all of my uses.
I use Contour as my main terminal emulator, but I used WezTerm for a long time as well. WezTerm was reliable and quick and can also do multiplexing, but I switched away since it had some configuration issues and issues with window decorations on River-based window managers. Contour has been a fast and reliable terminal emulator, although it does not do any multiplexing. Instead, I use tmux, the most well-known multiplexer, which performs very well.
I use Bash to run most of my scripts, but I primarily use fish for my day-to-day interactions. fish has many great features that I would recommend checking out for yourself, and scripting is dead easy.
My prompt is powered by starship, which has been reliably customizable for years now and I would recommend literally everyone use.
I have two mandatory replacements to existing tools. First, eza is an alternative to the standard
lsthat provides better details. Second, zoxide is a an alternative to the standardcdthat uses fuzzy finding to go where you want.I love DIYfetch, an alternative to Neofetch or Fastfetch that is nothing more than a suited up Gum script. Speaking of Gum, I would highly recommend checking out all of the software made by Charm, after all, Charm loves open source!
I switch between two text editors, the first of which is NeoVim, a very well known text editor. I am partial to a very minimal configuration, using only the built-in package manager and LSP client. The only major plugins I use are Windline, gitsigns, Neo-tree, and Telescope.
I also use Kakoune, a highly opinionated code editor with similar bindings to Vim. I think Kakoune gets almost everything right, but it is lesser known so when I have the occasional issue it is usually harder to solve. It makes working with multiple cursors extremely easy and highly encouraged, and also has many features that make it easy to learn and intuitive. The only plugins I use are auto-pairs and kak-harpoon.
I use grim, slurp, and swappy to power a custom screenshot script that you can find in my dot files.
Being a mathematician, I do a lot of typesetting. $\LaTeX$ is the standard for this, I when I do use it I usually use Overleaf as my compiler. I have also used Typst extensively, and I think it has both benefits and downsides, particularly things like matrices and figures I find easier, but I dislike the departure from backslashes. I use the two tools interchangably, whenever they fit my usecase.
My personal email is managed through Proton Mail, a more secure general-use email client. Proton makes an entire suite of apps, but this is the only one I use regularly.
I currently host all of my code using GitHub, but I do plan to make the switch to Codeberg sometime in the future.