dotfiles

This is mydotfile repo. The dotfiles are managed by stow.

System startup procedure:

bios->bootloader->X server (.xinitrc) with display manager -> login && window manager -> .xprofile

The tools I'm using:

Tool	Link
display manager	lightdm
greeter	unity-greeter. See this to change the greeter background.
window manager	bspwm
screen manager	autorandr
key mapping	sxhkd
bar	polybar 3.6.3-85
X wallpaper	feh
Image Viewer	nsxiv
Image Viewer	qimgv
lockscreen	betterlockscreen depend on imagemagick and i3lock-color
emoji font	noto-fonts-emoji
X compositor	picom
menu	rofi
menu	dmenu 4.8
notify	dunst and libnotify frontend
screenshot	main
screenshot	Flameshot for more featured screenshot
screecast	simplescreenrecorder
video player	vlc
video editor	kdenlive
input method framework	ibus with ibus-libpinyin
terminal	alacritty
fuzzy finder	fzf 0.35.1
editor	nvim, my neovim config can be found here
shell	zsh
terminal session manager	tmux
file manager	ranger
file manager	vifm
password manager	pass with rofi-pass, browserpass-native with extension on chrome and Android-Password-Store on android
filedinder	fdfind
grep	ripgrep
terminal text picker	tmux-thumbs
clipboard	xclip
clipboard manager	clipmenu
filesystem tool	duf
disk usage tool	dust
storage device manager	udisks and udiskie frontend
git	lazygit
cat	bat
top	htop-vim
ls	exa
pdf reader	zathura
terminal browser	w3m
git cli diff	delta
timer	pomotroid
file share	syncthing
network overlay	nebula with syncthingtray as tray
windows app	winapps with qemu

speed up your linux

using swap

It is better to have more ram memory.

Using more swap memory is not a good idea, because it will slow down your system. by change the swappiness, you can make the system use swap memory less often. The default swappiness is 60, you can change it to 10 by sudo sysctl vm.swappiness=25 Make this permanent by sudo echo vm.swappiness=25 >> /etc/sysctl.conf

speed up linux by tmpfs

Many Linux distro use tmpfs for /tmp, but debain/ubuntu currently don't. Enable tmpfs for /tmp by

echo "tmpfs /tmp tmpfs rw,noatime,nosuid,nodev" | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab
sudo reboot

By default, a tmpfs partition has its maximum size set to half your total RAM. You can change this by adding a size parameter to the fstab entry, e.g. tmpfs /tmp tmpfs rw,size=2G 0 0 Another method is enable it by systemd

sudo cp -v /usr/share/systemd/tmp.mount /etc/systemd/system/
sudo systemctl enable tmp.mount
sudo reboot
systemctl status tmp.mount

Note that you should do this only if your machine has enough ram available (generally at least 8GB) You can also change the size of the tmpfs partition by changing the value of the SizeMax parameter in /etc/systemd/system/tmp.mount

make program use tmpfs for /tmp

#!/bin/bash 
mkdir /tmp/chrome-cache-alw
ln -sf /tmp/chrome-cache-alw ~/.cache/google-chrome

You can mount ~/.cache as tmpfs, but Some naughty programs store things there that they want later and assume it will be there after a reboot. Take you own risk.

/etc/fstab can be

tmpfs       /tmp                    tmpfs   rw,noatime,nosuid,nodev                         0   0
tmpfs       /var/cache/apt          tmpfs   noatime,mode=0755,uid=0,gid=0                   0   0
tmpfs       /home/dd/.cache         tmpfs   size=4g,noatime,mode=0700,uid=1000,gid=1000     0   0
tmpfs       /ram                    tmpfs   size=8g,noatime,mode=0700,uid=1000,gid=1000     0   0

• mounting /var/cache/apt as tmpfs, the apt package manager will be downloading all archives to RAM, and extracting them from RAM to disk. This speeds up installations and upgrades.
• mounting /ram as tmpfs, gives us a general folder to use as RAM disk, with a size of 8GB. This can be used to download files, archives to extract to disk, etc., where the speed of RAM is desirable.
• the size=[x] option will specify how much RAM can be used for each mountpoint.
• the mode=[xxxx] option will set the directory permissions (who can read, write, and execute)
• using the noatimeoption will eliminate needless disk operations, improving all disk performance.

stow

stow create symbolic link to files or directories automatically. The symbol link use same name as the original files. For management of dotfiles, you should first move your dot file to the dofiles dir, then use stow to create a symbol link.

Here is an exampled:

cd ~
mkdir dotfiles
mkdir dotfiles/bash
mv ~/.bashrc ~/dotfiles/bash/
cd dotfiles
stow bash

The default target folder that stow creating symbol link is the parent dir of current dir. In the above example, it's the home dir. You can specify the target dir with stow -t. stow also create subdir automatically. e.g. let's say you original is

---home
-----|
-----|--.config 
-----------|
-----------|----nvim
-----------|------|
-----------|------|---init.lua

You should have the following in dotfiles by mv ~/.config/nvim ~/dotfiles/nvim, which results in

---home
-----|
-----|--dotfiles 
-----------|
-----------|---nvim
-----------------|--.config 
-----------------------|
-----------------------|----nvim
-----------------------|------|
-----------------------|------|---init.lua

Then just stow nvim in ~/dotfiles.

For tmux, you should use tmux version newer than 3.1 to use config file located in .config/tmux/.

other way to manage dotfiles

use git bare repository .