Fulfilling a reader's request for my "dot files"

Fulfilling a reader's request for my "dot files"

I got a bit of feedback the other day from Nate asking if I had dot files. I certainly do. I assume what they meant is if I have particular customizations, and then if I would care to share them. I definitely have a bunch of particular changes, and as for sharing them, why not. It lets me get a bunch of shots in at things that have become annoying over the years, and that means it's perfect for stirring up the hornet nests with a Friday night post.

Starting on my daily driver box that runs Debian, then:

I have a .bashrc that has a bunch of dumb two- or three-letter aliases which amount to 'ssh (otherbox)'. For some reason that is lost to time, they all start with the letter m, and then the second letter sometimes reflects the name of the target system - "mm" takes me to my Mac Mini (which also runs Debian), for instance.

The stock PS1 bugged me a bit, so I mangled it down to this:

export PS1='\h:\w\$ '

... which turns into "hostname:/some/path$ ", in other words.

I think I've had a prompt like that on my personal machines basically forever - probably back to 1994 if not before. That's fine when I'm just running things as myself. If I run sudo, I get the stock setting which ends up looking like this:

root@hostname:/some/path#

... and that's fine, too. Making it look a bit different when rootly powers are in force is a good thing.

The next one is switching off another annoyance:

alias ls='/bin/ls -N'

The -N switch to ls says "print entry names without quoting" ... and it's the difference between having just the filename shown, spaces or no, and having it 'wrapped like this'. The way I see it, if you're printing quotes there, they'd better be part of the damn name. It reminds me of the time they started doing crazy UTF-8 "smart quotes" in their error messages and I didn't know it had changed. Cue me going "WTF is this gunk in this filename?" and thinking we had major corruption in the system somewhere.

I'd probably put up with the quoting if it didn't bump everything else out to the right another column. Two spaces between the time and the filename? Heresy!

The next two are filed under "everyone sucks at setting colors in Unix tools so stop adding it to everything". The first one is for sar:

export S_COLORS=never

... and the second one is something I found a little later which seems to be something that might work across multiple programs (assuming they've been patched to recognize it):

export NO_COLOR="eat flaming death you [elided]"

You can guess what the rest of it says. The actual value doesn't matter. Just having it set does the job. The value I put there is just to make me feel better every time I have to fight to get back to the perfectly working system I've had.

That's it for .bashrc. Next, I have .gitconfig which is mostly boring. There's a [user] section which has name= and email=, and those are set to about what you would expect.

I have pull.rebase set to true because that's always what I would use anyway when doing a pull, and it started whining at some point. So I put this in here to make it keep doing what I wanted. This is because I don't do branches and other goofiness and just want a nice simple continuous timeline for my commits.

I also have init.defaultBranch set to main because, eh, why not? I've designed enough systems based on the old broken naming schemes and don't need any more.

I have a .gdbinit. Why? Same old story: the default now sucks. It has one line:

set style_enabled off

It's amazing just how awful it is when it changes colors every time it hits a ( or " or whatever. How do people deal with that stuff? So bad. It's so nasty.

Next up, .nanorc, and this one is a three-ring circus. Basically, for the longest time, I didn't need one of these. Now, I add about one line on average every three or four years because - again - things keep changing for the worse.

Here's where things are now:

syntax "all" ".*"
color yellow "^$"
unset locking
set emptyline
set breaklonglines

The first two have been with me for quite a while now, and serve to disable syntax highlighting across the board. Again, not my thing.

Line three stops it from pooping out stupid ~ files everywhere. Not wanted, not needed, didn't ask for it, was forced upon me, had to murder it with a setting.

Lines four and five just put back behaviors that they dumped in 4.0: the blank line right below the status bar at the top, and the wordwrap that happens when you hit a certain column. I use that all the time, like, well, *right now* writing this post. It hard-wraps at 72, because OF COURSE it does.

Next is my .Xresources which provides a way to disable some obnoxious behavior in urxvt without having to recompile it. For the longest time, I'd chop it out and drop a custom binary into my bin directory. Then I realized it could be tamed without such mangling, and here we are:

URxvt.perl-ext:
URxvt.perl-ext-common:

This has the effect of making it so a double-click highlights the whole word, and a third click highlights the whole line *even if* someone's holding a LISP convention on that particular row of the terminal.

Then I have a .xsessionrc which needs to exist because I now log in through xdm, and the window manager (fluxbox) ends up inheriting *that* environment. Yep, it doesn't get a .bashrc type thing applied to it. (Not gonna lie - this took a while to figure out. Quick, which of .bashrc, .bash_profile, .profile et al get run for any given type of login you do to a box? Text mode, X *and* ssh all matter.) Anyway, that means I have to twiddle my PATH in there, or the commands that fluxbox runs for me won't find anything in those extra directories.

That is, I like my .fluxbox/menu entries to be short and sweet, like "term". That's a small stupid script in my bin directory. If that's not in my PATH then I'd have to spell out the whole /home/blahblah thing, and that's just idiotic.

Speaking of fluxbox, that has a dot directory, and a startup script in there to set a few things up properly.

xset b off
xset r rate 250 30
xset dpms 1900 2000 2100
xscreensaver &

Line one turns off the console beep - not that my machine has a PC squeaker any more, but I think some things try to be "helpful" by sending a beep into the system audio path. That can be really obnoxious, like when I'm deliberately holding down a key for whatever reason and get to the beginning of the line.

Line two is about getting that key-repeat going at a speed I like. If I end up on a machine where that's not fast enough, it becomes obvious pretty quickly, and I have to go adjust things. Not every situation allows for things like ^W to eat a word or ^U to eat the whole line, and so holding down backspace to change the wording of something is what I want.

Likewise, if I want to put a "-------------" divider somewhere, I don't want to wait for it to get going. It looks like that means "wait 250 ms before repeating, and then repeat at 30 Hz", but I had to look it up because it's been set like that for as long as I can recall.

Or maybe I want to hold down the cursor key to scroll something, or just move somewhere else on the line. Same thing.

Annoyingly, this seems to be set in the keyboard itself and not on anything local to the machine, so if I have to replug the keyboard for some reason, I have to run that again or it'll be stuck in stock molasses mode. This feels like a regression from the PS/2 days but I haven't bothered plugging in one of my old model Ms to verify this.

Line three just sets up the power-saver specifics on the monitor. Those don't usually matter too much since I have a hotkey that explicitly locks things and then forces it to go to sleep right away, and I push that when I'm done using this thing.

Line four, well, that's my dose of jwz, and that's what actually keeps the screen locked, as opposed to the legions of craptacular also-ran "lock" programs that always end up sucking and failing open. I can't imagine how many years in total my screens have been protected by xscreensaver in "lock" mode.

The rest of that file just starts my three Window Maker-era widgets and those aren't important or even interesting. There's a clock/calendar, the CPU load, and something to twiddle the system volume for when I have speakers or headphones connected.

That's about it. I don't use .plan or .project files any more since I haven't run fingerd for decades, and besides, my machines are all just me and nobody else, and so a local finger is also not a thing. (Oh, get your minds out of the gutter. It's the "ratting out to the cops" sense of "finger".)

Want to see the last time I used one that stuff? Here's the file in my homedir archive from the last machine which had that running:

-r-------- 1 rkroll rkroll 34 Apr 28  1996 .plan

See, told you it's been decades. All I did was rip off a line that I had seen in someone else's file that was intended to sow confusion:

Segmentation fault (core dumped).

The idea is that you'd think that the far-end finger process crashed, or the far-end finger daemon, or maybe even *your local finger client*, and then you'd run around trying to figure it out. Then you'd eventually realize what was going on and shoot a nerf dart at whoever wasted your time.

Ah, the '90s.