Unix Home Configuration

Author: P. Neidhardt

2014-03-22

Description

This repository contains scripts and configuration files for various Unix programs. It targets Arch Linux and FreeBSD, but since these are "fundamental" Unix distributions, it might work for most other Unices as well. I tried hard to maintain universality: it should work anywhere (whatever the versions of the programs are installed) with as few modifications as possible.

Most interesting parts include advanced configuration for Emacs, Mutt, and some interesting shell scripts like a video transcoding wrapper using FFmpeg.

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Awesome

• Extra deps: Vicious (Linux only)

Configuration is very close to the default one, which mostly fits my needs. Most of the work I've done is for the status bar: dynamic network speed (it checks for different interfaces), CPU speed, dynamic battery that will not show up if no battery is detected, and sound volume. But since I'm using the Vicious plugin, it is quite straightforward.

This configuration is for now very version-sensitive, so you should make sure to use latest build.

dwb

Some custom options, download location, search engines, plugins, etc. Custom "fast-forward" javascript.

Emacs

Emacs daemon is integrated flawlessly thanks to a small script -- see the scripts folder. Because terminal and graphical clients do not behave the same way, it is sometimes useful to specify which version should be used. For mutt, ranger bulkrename, git commit message and dwb, it is required to wait for the client to return, for which only the console client will work properly.

Configuration for C programming. Bindings to compile either from makefile or from a custom command if no makefile is found.

TeX and LaTeX full-featured home-made environment: no AucTeX required, itemize function, skeletons, dynamic compilation with various engines, dynamic configuration with automatic index generation if necessary, proper PDF view, temp files clean function, PDF compression, SyncTeX support.

Custom theme with 256 colors, works for both text and graphical Emacs.

A lot of functions.

A lot of skeletons for shell, C, LaTeX and others.

Mutt

• Compile options: IMAP and SMTP support.
• Patch: sidebar.
• Extra deps: antiword, ccrypt, fortune, sxiv, w3m.

Mutt is not easy to grasp at first. I managed to get multiple accounts with encrypted passwords working, which means there is no plain password stored on the disk. As a result, I just get prompted for a main password on Mutt startup, then everything works out of the box. I use ccrypt for password management because it is much simpler than gnupg.

I'm using embedded IMAP and SMTP services which need appropriate compilation options.

Some customization: custom index view, good Emacs integration (see .emacs), custom theme (matches Emacs colors), various tweaks.

Thanks to the colorset.sh script, Mutt will check terminal color support and load colors appropriately. Therefore this configuration should work on any terminal, should it have 256-colors support or not.

URxvt has an URL support that works also for Mutt. For other terminals, you might consider using the 'urlview' plugin for Mutt.

Ranger

• Extra deps: antiword, atool, highlight, img2txt, mediainfo, odt2txt, pdftotext, unrtf, w3m.

Custom bindings, file association, tweaked a few options, additional functions (mkcd, extracthere...).

Scripts

Probably the most interesting part here.

archive: simple tar wrapper to create archive for files and folders.

asciify: convert many non-ASCII characters to their nearest ASCII counterpart.

bsdman: read *BSD man pages.

crun: quick way to execute C files.

dataindex: create index of hierarchies. Useful to keep track of folder content and structure.

ediff: diff with Emacs.

einfo: info viewer with Emacs.

elisp: Emacs Lisp interpreter using Emacs.

extract: simple tar wrapper to extract archives. Atool should be preferred if available.

git-*: some git helper functions for sync and so on.

homeinit: initialize a new home configuration, i.e. get needed files, create symlinks, etc.

hsync: hierarchy synchronizer. Can prove very handy to sync large audio/video folders.

imagemount: an CDEmu/fuseiso wrapper that creates/deletes virtual drives automatically.

mover: move and merge folder into destination.

netinit: network setup. Works with wpa_supplicant. May replace any network manager.

pacsize: print pacman package size.

pdf*: PDF manipulation, e.g. extract pages, compress, resize to A4.

pkggen: generate lists of installed with pacman, FreeBSD's pkg and tlmgr (TeX Live manager).

tc-video-*: batch conversion of any kind of videos. Using FFmpeg.

translate: a translation frontend to Internet services. Default to stdin and stdout (the Unix way), thus usable from your favorite text editor.

Shell

• Target: POSIX shell, dash, zsh

A lot of stuff: aliases, functions, shell options, etc.

Please note that this config is mainly intended -- and tested -- for zsh. I removed bash support since it is really a scourge to shell scripting. However most of the scripts and the shell configuration are POSIX shell compatible (tested with dash).

TeX

Plain TeX macros, most importantly a partial UTF-8 support (taken from LaTeX).

A lot of LaTeX macros. Among others: pie charts, dynamic plots with input file and trend.

Plain TeX macros are in the '.texmf' folder.

URxvt

• Extra deps: Muennich's perl extensions (keyboard-select, clipboard, url-matcher)

Custom font and colors, no scroll bar, url-matcher, clipboard, and keyboard-select.

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Usage

The only purpose is to be a source of inspiration. Examples are always a good technical support. (Especially for applications that do not provide examples in their documentation.) There is no use in blind-copying the content of any file into your personal home folder. At best it might break things.

In case you still want to copy some files -- for quick and dirty testing purpose -- do not forget that most of the files are in hidden folders. Also note that in some shells, the '*' joker will NOT match hidden files, that is

cp -r source-dir/* dest-dir/

will copy non-hidden folders only. To match all folders, use the following joker instead:

cp -r source-dir/{.*,*} dest-dir/

Still, the solution will not work for bash. A more convenient solution for bash:

shopt -s dotglob
cp -r source-dir/* dest-dir/

Versioning

Git makes it possible to use your home folder as a git repo, thus versioning all files directly. To do so:

cd
git init
git remote add origin <repo>
git fetch
git branch master origin/master
git checkout master

Some applications will need extra dependencies other than the default ones. You might have a look at the lists in the .pkg/ folder to know what software I've been using.

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Known issues

Scripts

• All scripts take a strong point at being POSIX. However, there is no POSIX way (at least to my knowledge) to execute a shell function on the result of a 'find'. Neither 'find' nor 'xargs' can execute shell functions. One solution to this would be to call an external script, but then we lose all global variables. For now we assume no input file has newline, which is quite a strong assumption and not safe at all.

URxvt

• There is a bug with Xft anti-aliased font that prevent w3m image preview from working (too bad for ranger). Use non-Xft fonts as a workaround.

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Noteworthy apps

• aalib
• abook
• aircrack-ng
• antiword
• apvlv
• asciidoc
• atool
• awesome
• awk
• bashmount
• bc
• bmake
• cabextract
• cal
• calc
• catdvi
• ccrypt
• cdrkit
• cdrtools
• centerim
• chrpath
• cmus
• column
• comm
• cppcheck
• cut
• darktable
• dash
• dcraw
• demlo
• diff
• dosbox
• doxygen
• driconf
• dtach
• dvtm
• dwb
• ecryptfs
• ecryptfs-simple
• emacs
• encfs
• evince
• fbpdf
• fbv
• fdisk
• feh
• ffmpeg
• file
• finch
• fmt
• fortune
• gaupol
• gcolor2
• gdb
• gimp
• gnuplot
• gparted
• graphicsmagick
• graphviz
• grep
• grip
• groff
• gtypist
• guile
• hdparm
• highlight
• htop
• hugin
• i3
• id3v2
• imagemagick
• inkscape
• iotop
• irssi
• latex2html
• latex2rtf
• lrzip
• lsb-release
• lshw
• ltrace
• lua
• luakit
• luarocks
• lyvi
• mcomix
• mediainfo
• minidlna
• mkfs
• mkvtoolnix
• mplayer2
• mpv
• musl
• mutt
• nasm
• nawk
• ncdu
• nethogs
• newsbeuter
• ngrep
• nmap
• numlockx
• octave
• od
• odt2txt
• openshot
• openssh
• p7zip
• parallel
• pari
• parted
• patch
• poppler
• pstotext
• pwgen
• qemu
• ranger
• rawtherapee
• re2c
• rsync
• rtorrent
• rxvt-unicode
• scrot
• sdlmame
• sdparm
• sed
• shred
• slock
• sort
• splint
• strace
• subdl
• submarine
• sudo
• surfraw
• sxiv
• sxlock
• syslinux
• task
• tcc
• tcpdump
• texi2html
• texinfo
• texlive
• textadept
• tig
• transmission
• trash-cli
• tree
• udiskie
• uncrustify
• unrtf
• unshield
• upx
• valgrind
• vim
• vlock
• vsftpd
• w3m
• weechat
• wipe
• wireshark
• wmfs
• wv
• x264
• xchm
• xclip
• xlockmore
• xosd
• yasm
• youtube-dl
• zathura
• zsh