Know Your System and Tools

I use GNU/Linux BTW. When I got introducted to Ubuntu for the first time, I was surprised on how easy was it to install/remove packages from the command line unlike windows, where one has to go to the site, then download the installer, run it, and then they have the application. On Ubuntu it was just sudo apt install <pacakge-name>. Another good thing about using Ubuntu as your first linux distribution is that it has a big community, meaning that if you are facing any issue, then someone else might have faced it as well, and finding solutions on forums will be relatively easy.

I started trying other distributions because Ubuntu has very old packages which sometimes breaks a lot of things. Like once I was trying someone's neovim config, and I got a lot of errors because neovim was very old. I use ARCH now. It's not the best distribution in the world considering that without AUR, Archlinux is same as any other distribution, and AUR breaks the system very often. Today itself I was trying to install docker-desktop but it errored because some dependency was owned by some other package. But putting all that aside, it has almost all the packages (latest) one can think of, and the learning experience cusotmizing Archlinux is very valuable.

A text editor is the tool that developers use to edit sourcecode. As a developer, taking some time out to know your text editor is the best investment one can make. There are two choices Neovim or Emacs, and I am happy with none, and the dissatisfaction is so much that I plan to write one of my own. I use neovim (primarily) to write code, and I use emacs to take notes, and maintain this site. Neovim is super fast and when paired with tmux, it's a fatal solution. Emacs on the other hand is very powerful for text editing, but it's very slow when working with large files.

I struggled to choose between the two for a long time to the point where it started affecting my work. I stopped thinking about it anymore, and just decided on what works for the job. I still believe that If we don't have an editor as fast as neovim, and as capable as emacs in 2024, then it's a shame. These editors are from the 80's and 90's, and things have changed. We have new scripting languages, more capable Graphics APIs, and bigger than ever community around FOSS.

Tiling Window Managers basically arrange the windows such that maximum space on the screen is utilized. There are a lot of them, i3, DWM, awesomewm, BSPWM. With tiling window managers, you can control most aspects of your desktop windows with keyboard shortkuts, making it very efficient, which is questionable considering how much time one spends hunting and configuring them. I don't like desktop environments, as they are very resource heavy, and mouse driven which makes them slow compared to tiling ones. Even then if I were to choose, I would prefer KDE over Gnome.

I have used all of the mentioned tilers at some point or the other. I used DWM for the longest time, and recently switched to awesomewm. Awesome unlike other tiling window managers comes with really good mouse support, builtin topbar/notification system, and has titlebars with buttons. This is how my awesomewm looks like as of writing this blog. Update: After using awesomewm for some time, I am back to DWM. Now I am of the opinion that DWM's simplicity is something not worth giving up for titlebars and icons.

This is my favourite topic, and it's the most frustrating part of using linux. Now when you have configured your text editor, the tiling window manager, and other programs, you would want to save it. There are a lot of ways to do so. First one is very simple, just put all the files/folders in a git repository, and Done! Now whenever you reinstall the system just clone that repository, and move the files to their desired locations.

I like sharing about what interesting/cool things I have been doing, and what better way than to write a blog about it. There are various tools called SSGs or Static Site Generators which convert markdown doucments to html web pages, and they allow a lot of cool customizations like custom css and js, but the issue is that most of them are quite barebones, and I couldn't find a nice markdown editor.

These SSGs are good for just that, you cannot interlink the links, and it's annoying to not see the markup as I type. I have been using emacs for quite some time, and emacs has org-mode which renders markup as you type. It has a package called org-roam which lets you create org notes and interlink them with each other, somewhat like obsidian, but way more powerful. Emacs also has builtin support for exporting the org files to various file formats like html, markdown, LaTeX, pdf etc. I publish my blogs leveraging all these features. Emacs also allows to keep some org-roam files as drafts, and we can specify which sections from an org document we want to export, and which we want to exclude. I wrote a blog about it Publish Org-Roam Notes as a Website which explains the process more thoroughly and provides code snippets for the same.

I host my site on gitlab pages, which has a lot of advantages over github pages. The repository can be named anything, and can either be public or private, unlike in github pages, where it has to be public, and named username.github.io. Gitlab is community run, so it's a way better place to store my files.

1. dotfiles repository
2. techdufus dotfiles