Intro

If you're looking for yet-another-dotfile repo, you've come to the right place! My current development environment uses the following components:

• Windows Subsystem for Linux
• Microsoft Terminal
• tmux
• neovim
• lightweight git aliases
• zshell + starship with one of the default starship themes

Note that this configuration is fairly opinionated and most of it is not well documented. This configuration makes heavy use of git submodules --- be sure to run git submodule update --init --recursive after installation.

See section Fresh Installation for information about quickly getting a new system up-to-speed.

Tour

The most interesting bits to others would probably be:

1. My tmux config files
2. My clipboard configuration
3. My shell config files
4. My dircolors config files

Tmux

I have a keybinding alt + shift + I which I use to force tmux into an ignore mode. In this mode, tmux will directly pass-through all keystrokes to the underlying program except for alt + shift + I which undoes ignore mode.

This is useful for nested tmux sessions, because:

1. It allows the user to switch back and forth between local and remote tmux sessions in a single keypress.
2. It allows the user to work in a nested tmux session without typing the prefix-key twice every time a tmux-command is used remotely.

Clipboard

Managing the clipboard can be quite frustrating when several tools have their own notion of clipboard. In my personal computing environments, my window manager (either X/Wayland or Windows Desktop), terminal multiplexer (tmux), and editor (neovim) all have separate clipboards.

To make this a bit more hospitable, for WSLv2 installations, I include configuration directives for tmux and neovim that sync their contents with the system clipboard using win32yank.

A similar trick could be performed on Linux, but I haven't yet completed this integration as I'm still daily driving WSLv2 for work.

Shell

Underneath the /shell directory I have a unified shell init file shellrc for bash and zsh usage. I configure terminal colors using a modified version of tinted-shell (the popular spin-off of base16-shell) because I find the tinty tool recommended by tinted theming to be a bit too heavyweight. The great thing is that this solution does not depend on Xresources or any other non-shell config file. As long as your terminal supports changing colors by escape codes, this method will work.

Dircolors

Dircolors is a system to configure color pretty-printing when listing files using the ls command. Unfortunately, due to wonky permission mappings, when accessing the windows filesystem from linux, most standard dircolors choices look quite bad. To rememdy this, I collected a variety of free color scripts and modified a free test script so that I could compare various choices. This script can be found under dircolors/test.

Fresh Installation

Installing a WSL Distribution

If installing a new WSL distribution, my recommended approach is to use LxRunOffline. To use LxRunOffline, first download the tool. Then, in an elevated Windows command prompt, run the following steps:

1. Install the distribution

   LxRunOffline.exe i -n <distro_name> -d <distro_filesystem_directory> -f <distro_filesystem_tarball>

2. Use wsl to set the version

   wsl.exe --set-version <distro_name> 2

3. (Recommended) Set systemd emulation in /etc/wsl.conf to make working with standard Linux services easier:

   wsl.exe -d <distro_name> -e bash -c "echo -e '[boot]\nsystemd=true' >> /etc/wsl.conf"

4. Finally, once the system has been configured with a proper user, set the default user for subsequent WSL invocations:

   LxRunOffline.exe su -n <distro_name> -v <uid>

   Note: <uid> is almost always 1000.

Post-Installation Steps

When installing on a fresh system, there are a couple post-installation steps:

1. After cloning, this repository should be moved to $HOME/.config

2. After cloning, run git submodule update --init --recursive to grab all submodules

3. Check the meta/install directory for both:

   • distribution specific install scripts
   • the link script which setups symlinks in $HOME for various configuration files