utility-scripts

This repository contains a few scripts that I use generally when running my desktop environment. Also lists a couple of conventions/packages/tools that I usually use on Linux systems.

Scripts

commands : A utility to store descriptions on different commands. Useful when you forget your commands quite often ( like l3abdou lellah... ). Style heavily inspired by nvChad

open : A utility used as a shortcut to open projects & files fast.

Useful packages

CLI

• yay : An AUR helper used in Arch & Arch-based distros. Helps building and updating AUR packages .

  • Syntax is very similar to pacman, the default package manager for arch systems.
  • Handles conflicts & issues in a much better way than pamac (from personal experience).

• paru : Another very useful AUR helper, written in Rust.

  • Maintained by the biggest contributor of yay.
  • Syntax is very similar to yay.
  • Relatively newer than yay (and less stable).

• tldr : A very useful CLI tool, shows brief documentation for CLI tools.

  • The examples are brief and straight forward, helps when we don't want to check the whole man page of the commands.

• xclip : Useful tool to copy and paste from the Terminal directly.

• translate-shell : Translate text directly from the CLI

  • Uses google translate by default, but can use other backends to translate with.
  • also supports TTS (Text To Speach).

• dict : An implementation of the DICT protocol. a CLI dictionary protocol.

• peek : Used to create gifs

• direnv : Separate the environment of different projects.

  • a simple cd into the project will load its .envrc containing all its env variables.
  • using a cd out of the project will unload all its env variables.

• bat : A cat clone with many extra functionalities.

  • Syntax highlighting
  • Git integration
  • Show non-printable characters with -A ( Saved my life many times! )

• taskwarrior : One of the best todo list managers from the CLI.

  • Highly configurable & very useful even in simple cases
  • Can show charts ( burndown ect... )

• btop : Alternative to top but with much more information.

• nethogs : Used to monitor network usage for processes.

• neovim : The future of vim!

  • Better copying/pasting mechanism
  • Cursor changes when in Insert mode, making changes easier

• kitty : a GPU based terminal emulator

  • Can show images
  • Supports emojis out of the box
  • Much faster then the default xfce4-terminal

GUI

• Obsidian : A very useful Markdown editor

  • Clean and simple UI that gets the job done.
  • Completely free & no annoying popups! ( wink wink typora )

• drawio-desktop : Draw Diagrams for architectures offline.

  • Very useful when we don't have an internet connection, or when we don't want to use the web version.

• Insomnia : An API design platform

  • Supports offline development with no hustle.
  • Much better than Postman ( which separates offline and online workspaces... )

• Datagrip : Useful to manage SQL databases from a unified frontend

• beekeeper-studio : An alternative to Datagrip

  • If we have no access to JetBrains products. We can use this instead.

• VScode : No introductions necessary

Conventions & Practices

These are the personal conventions I use when I first set up any Linux system.

• ~/.system/.init : I use this file to store my aliases & Env variables. It's included in ~/.bashrc.

• Regular usage directories need to have their own env variables, then exported in ~/.system/.init

Shortcuts To daily projects

for that, I created a script open

I use this to open projects I work on daily or files that I check regularly.

Check the open script for an example of usage.

It's also important to add the open-completion script to ~/.system/.init like this, to enable completion for command names.

source path/to/open-completion

Unloading the beeping module

In /etc/modprobe.d/nobeep.conf I add this:

blacklist pcspkr

The module becomes blacklisted at boot. Very useful to disable the annoying beep sound that we get sometimes.

for more info, check: Archlinux Wiki - PC speaker

Copying directly from the terminal

For that, I use the xclip package described above.

I add this alias to ~/.system/.init

alias xclip='xclip -selection clipboard'

Then we can use it like this

echo "Stuff to copy" | xclip

Supporting Syntax highlighting in cat

for that, I use the bat package described above, with this alias in ~/.system/.init

alias cat='bat -pp'

Saving into the same file in bash

In bash:

• redirections are processed before the command is actually executed, but
• expansions are processed before redirections.

This means that for cat file > file, the output redirection (which truncates the file) occurs before cat is spawned, and cat now has an empty file to work with.

To avoid this. We can use sponge which is part of the moreutils package. By doing

cat file | sponge file

This is especially useful when we have many operations. and we want to save them into the same file.

cat file | sort | cut -d" " -f1 | head -n 5 | sponge file

Note that some commands can save the output into the same file already. like sed -i for example

Add Swap (Very important)

Running out of memory in Linux is never a good thing. The system will crash with no warnings. For that it's very important to add Swap memory ( 4 ~ 5 GB is enough )

There's no reason to add a swap partition in the initial setup. We can do it later on using a swap file that we create. Both methods are viable but the second is more flexible.

Do not enable services for packages

Very important, we don't want anything to launch automatically at startup. Keep the services disabled and start them when necessary (to save memory)

Cheatsheets

Check Cheatsheets Repository

Books for topics should never be checked out with the repo. Instead, we simply add their name to CheatSheets/TOPIC/books/books.txt and ignore them in .gitignore ( check existing topics for examples ).

Security

We should put sensitive files inside a vault using LUKS and then mount the vault when needed.