Linux

Managing dotfiles Chezmoi

I had been trying to find a good way to manage my dotfiles for years. I tried having my $HOME be a git working directory. That worked well, but not really for keeping multiple systems in sync. I looked at stow but I didn’t reall like the way it worked. Then I found chezmoi. And it’s perfect!

The Basics

Chezmoi, stores its configuration in the source directory. On Linux/BSD, the default location is ~/.local/share/chezmoi. To get started, you’d run:

Niri Window Manager

Niri

There I was: happily using Hyprland and BAM! Brodie Robertson shared a video about Niri – a scrolling window manager. It looked weird but intriguing, so I installed it. My plan was to see what it was like and go back to Hyprland. But we all know that’s not what happened.

Background

I’ve been using tiling window managers for a long time now. Back in late late 2000s/early 2010s, I was introduced to dwm. I ran dwm on my OpenBSD laptop for several years while also playing around with awesomewm, spectrwm, and cwm. Then I used a Mac for a while. But when I switched to Linux, I started using Ubuntu and its default environment, Gnome. But there were some things I didn’t like about Ubuntu, so I switched to Fedora, still using Gnome. But after a while, I switched over to Fedora’s KDE Spin. Again, though, I wasn’t too happy with Fedora and I found out about Arch Linux. Also, I really missed the keyboard-driven goodness that is a tiler.

Using Yad for ssh-askpass

OpenSSH

ssh-askpass is an X11 application for passing a user’s SSH Key passphrase to ssh-add ssh-add(1). But it only works with X11. And I’m on Wayland now.

Solution

Yad. Yad is Yet Another Dialog ala Zenity or Dialog. It allows for taking in input and passing it to something else in a similar way to the way ssh-askpass worked with X11.

A screenshot

This is how my yad-askpass window looks: