Configuration files

I'm using yadoma to manage my config files. This allows me to have all config files in one central folder and keep them in this git repository. Whenever I add a config file to the git repository, I also edit the config.yadoma file and re-run yadoma. By having the symlinks, editing the files in the config file folder propagates to the home directory and ultimately to the respective programs I start.

If you are just looking at this repository, you might wonder "What are the files that I don't know about?" Here are some answers:

• i3 is an auto-tiling window manager. Your windows cover the whole screen and they are set up in a way to reorganize when you open more windows. This is totally amazing if you want to use a window manager to be able to open windows, but you actually don't want to do a lot of mouse interaction with your computer. If you really like your mouse, an auto-tiling window manager might not be for you.

  To install i3, you should use the package manager of your linux distribution. For debian derivatives (e.g. ubuntu) use the command

  apt update apt install i3

  You would afterwards have to log out and log back into an "i3-session".

• bash is a shell, i.e. a comand line interpreter. It is the default shell that runs in the terminal windows of MacOS or Ubuntu. It's a pretty amazing piece of software, but I rarely use it. Hence the simple copy of some standard configuration (I believe that I modified something but I can't quite remember what). In most linux distributions, bash is already installed.

• zsh is another shell. It has some (very few) additional features compared to bash, but there has been some kind of a code competition of writing the most amazing config file for zsh. I'm building on the zsh grml config and I added a couple of nice local functions. If you want to use zsh temporarily, you can just type zsh on the command line. If you actually want to switch to zsh permanently, you would have to use chsh.

  To install zsh use your package manager like this

  apt update apt install zsh

  The zsh configuraton depends on the powerlevel9k prompt. To get that running properly, you might also want to install the nerd-fonts. To use zsh as your default shell, you have to set that up as default using

  which zsh chsh

  Where you enter the output of the first command when you're prompted for the preferred login shell by the second command.

  Note that zsh configuration is more than just a fancy prompt but also a couple of useful commands. To learn those, take a look at the refcard.

• vim is a text editor with a steep learning curve. Yet, vim is by many (including myself) considered the best text editor out there. So once you've mastered the learning curve, you will never want to miss multiple modes of text editing, easy macros, or navigation with h, j, k, l. Vim becomes really cool if you configure it a little bit and the configuration snippets that existed on the internet grew at some point to a level where they would be more easily maintained as plugins. There are multiple plugin managers out there and I'm using vundle because I don't know better. If you want to actually use the plugins that I have in my config, you would have to install them. They are managed using vundle. Once you have vundle in place, you can install the plugins. You do that from within vim by typing (in normal mode):

  :PluginInstall

  and hit return (not that this will download and install the respective plugins. So this could take some time.

There are also two python tools that are configured here. yadoma has been explained above and triforce is a tool that helps you have certain python tools installed in a globally accessible virtual environment. This is cool, because you don't have to break your system python (you still install into a virtual environment), but you still have those tools available "everywhere". One particularly noteworthy python tool that triforce will install globally is pomo, which provides a very simple pomodori timer. There are many pomorodi timers out there, but -- surprisingly -- none of them had good tracking of overtime, which I think is important if you want to improve on your pomodori planning. If you just want everything to work, I suggest just creating a virtual environment, installing triforce and running it with the configuration you would like to use. Not that triforce will expect a folder in your home directory called bin.

To get the python tools running, you would simply create a (temporary) virtual environment, install triforce into it, run triforce with the correct config and you're set. Triforce will also install yadoma, so if you start with triforce, you should be able to use yadoma globally afterwards to create your symlinks.