Robin’s dotfiles

I hope you like fiddling with your .emacs.d ad nauseam, ‘cause I obviously do.

I’m currently running Debian on an X1 Nano, usually mirrored with a single big monitor. I use the i3 window manager, Firefox, and Emacs.

You’re probably here for my literate Emacs config! Most of my time is spent in either Emacs or Firefox. I think a text editor is just a terrific environment for editing text, so I use Emacs for all kinds of things that “normal” people use specialized tools for, including:

• Task management and general writing with Org,
• Email browsing with mu4e, backed by:
  • mbsync for synchronization over IMAP,
  • msmtp for sending messages over SMTP,
  • mu for managing a local searchable index,
  • gpg for encryption and signatures,
  • org-contacts for managing contacts and addresses, and
  • Fastmail for hosting,
• RSS feed reading and management with elfeed and elfeed-org, with keybindings to send articles to Instapaper to read on my phone later,
• Git with magit, and
• File management with dired and async.

There’s also a lot of programming-specific configuration in there. I write a lot of Ruby, but there’s plenty of other, too.

I also use some non-Emacs tools! I like:

• zathura as a PDF viewer,
• feh as my image viewer,
• pass for password management,
• rofi for launching applications, and to use with a few custom scripts,
• mpv and ytp-dl for watching videos,
• calibre for managing books and syncing to my Kindle, and
• a hodgepodge of Signal, Discord, Telegram, Zoom, and Slack for (quasi-)synchronous communication. They’re all clunky in their own ways, but: network effects.

This whole repository isn’t really intended for anyone’s use but my own, and of course it’s catered to my way of doing things, so, you know, be prepared for that.

Enjoy! 😁

Installation

Clone this thing wherever you like (I use ~/.dotfiles) and run the install.sh script. That will:

• Install a bunch of Debian packages,
• Set up a bunch of symlinks in your home directory (e.g., ~/.bashrc → ~/.dotfiles/shell/.bashrc), and
• Install a handful of required Ruby gems.

It (mostly) won’t overwrite existing files, so move those out of the way first.

Wallpaper

To ensure that wallpaper is set correctly, create a ~/.wallpaper-directory symlink to the directory where you keep your wallpapers:

$ ln -s /where/your/wallpapers/live ~/.wallpaper-directory