Linux - Tag - erdelynet.com

Managing dotfiles Chezmoi

mike@erdelynet.com (Michael Erdely) — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 22:28:45 -0400

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

mike@erdelynet.com (Michael Erdely) — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 15:38:33 +0000

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

mike@erdelynet.com (Michael Erdely) — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 15:31:00 +0000

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:

My dot Files

mike@erdelynet.com (Michael Erdely) — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 15:53:00 +0000

Originally published: 2021-11-27.

So that I can share how I’ve configured several of my applications and systems on my laptop, I’ve created a new Git project for my dotfiles.

Hope you can use them to find a different way to accomplish your goals or, even better, you find a bug or have a suggestion for me.

What are dotfiles?

“dotfiles” are generally files that being with a period in the filename. By starting a filename with a period character, they are hidden by default from many graphical file managers and the ls(1) command. With ls specifically, you can list “dotfiles” by running ls -a or ls -al.

Password Management with Bitwarden

mike@erdelynet.com (Michael Erdely) — Fri, 26 Nov 2021 17:28:00 +0000

In a past life, I managed both Lastpass and 1Password. Neither of them were something I wanted to use personally, so I was looking for something better.

In the mean time, I was using KeePassXC stored in Google Drive. And Holly and I also had a shared Keepass file stored in a shared directory so we could share passwords between us.

But then I learned about Bitwarden.

Wireguard: Home VPN Server

mike@erdelynet.com (Michael Erdely) — Fri, 26 Nov 2021 17:00:00 +0000

I used to use OpenVPN as a means to connect to my internal network from outside of my house. It worked really well, but managing its configs was a little bit of a hassle and, frankly, OpenVPN is old news (/s). I wanted to play with a new toy.

So I looked into Wireguard.

Server Config

Since I use Home Assistant and it has Add-Ons available available, I decided to use its Wireguard Add-On.

Centralized Bookmarks with Linkding

mike@erdelynet.com (Michael Erdely) — Thu, 25 Nov 2021 00:15:00 +0000

As I mentioned in my Qutebrowser article, my browser doesn’t have the ability to share bookmarks with my other browsers. I run Chrome on my phone and Chrome on my Chromebook. And I have a second Linux laptop that also runs Qutebrowser.

I needed a solution to share bookmarks between them. And I settled on Linkding.

My Search

I looked through Reddit r/selfhost and scoured the web looking at different self-hosted bookmark services I could run at home.

Qutebrowser

mike@erdelynet.com (Michael Erdely) — Wed, 24 Nov 2021 23:13:00 +0000

These days, it’s more important than ever to find a good web browser: one that’s easy to use, has the functionality you want, and, most importantly, is reasonably secure. It’s also a good idea to consider the privacy features the browser has too.

Too many of the popular browsers have privacy issues (Chrome sharing info with Google, Edge sharing info with Microsoft, Brave sharing info with…).

Applying style to ssh-askpass

mike@erdelynet.com (Michael Erdely) — Mon, 22 Nov 2021 19:13:00 +0000

ssh-askpass(1) is a graphical program that prompts the user for their SSH Key passphrase and passes it to the ssh-add(1) command.

Out of the box, ssh-askpass is pretty ugly, but I’ve managed to make it look dark, modern, and good.

A screenshot

This is how my ssh-askpass window looks:

The code

SshAskpass*Dialog.font:       -adobe-helvetica-bold-r-normal-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1
SshAskpass*Dialog.label:      Please enter your authentication passphrase:
SshAskpass*Dialog.title:
SshAskpass*background:        #000000
SshAskpass*foreground:        #cccccc
SshAskpass.Button*background: #000000
SshAskpass.Button*foreground: #cccccc

The above code goes in your ${HOME}/.Xresources file.

Qtile Window Manager

mike@erdelynet.com (Michael Erdely) — Mon, 22 Nov 2021 17:29:00 +0000

For most people, their window manager is something they probably don’t think much about. Consider all of the Windows and Mac users out there. They may or may not think about the fact that they appreciate how using Windows is different from using a Mac, but they may not be able to explain exactly why (Though over the past few years, it feels like Mac and Windows interfaces are slowing becoming very similar).