First of all there is coreutils, this is the thing every one knows and is used to. It has the regular things like cp, rm, mv and ls. It is however the basic of everything. Combined with shell globs this is a very powerful thing, and it can do any I wont go into the basics of those commands but I will share some examples that I found very useful and weren’t as obvious as others.

When you have a list of pictures, named pic001.png through pic732.png and you just want to remove pic051 through pic521, you can use shell ranges. They are defined like pic{<startno.>..<endno.>}, so in our example it will be like:

rm pic{051..521}.png

Also ls isn’t as useful as it could be by default. I think every distro has some basic options set for ls like --color=auto but there is a lot more. For example, I also like to have my directories and files seperate, and there is an option for that called --group-directories-first. I also like to see the size of the file as well as the permissions on the file, and ls -l is perfect for that, but the filesizes is in bytes by default, which isn’t really human readable. I mean, I don’t care my file is 45234786 bytes, I just want to know it’s 4MB. ls -lh is for that. I think by now we have a very useful ls, you can try it out by executing ls -lh --color=auto --group-directories-first in your favourite shell. Or, a lot more useful, you can make an alias.

Then we have cd which just does what it should, which is change to the directory specified. But as we all know, we mostly hang around a couple of directories, and we just want to switch to those easily and fast. Some archer named Joel Thelion made an application called autojump which he describes as The cd command that learns and that is exactly what it does. It keeps track of in what directory you are and how much you do in there and it calculates a weight of that. That weight is later used to determine where to move. I can explain it but it’s better to just try it, it is awesome!

I think that makes you able to do all the things you do in a normal file manager, but just with your fingers on your lovely clicky keyboard. We all know that you dislike the mouse, like you should according to a lot of linux elitists, although I have to be honest and I like it a lot for laid back browsing sessions. But to the point, and that is shell based file management. And the shell is so powerful because it’s scriptable, you can chain things together very easily. And the most amazing application for that is find.

For example, you have a directory filled with rars which you all want to unrar. Instead of unrarring them each on their own you can use find. We are trying to find the files ending in .rar in the directory “Archives”, so just to test what we find we can execute find Archives -name "*.rar" which should print out the path to those files. But we want to do something with those rars, not just know where they are, and find has a flag for that called -exec . -exec needs two things, the binary to execute, in our example it’s unrar e, and {} \;. The {} is replaced by the path it finds and \; mimics a return key being pressed.

I really hope I learned you something and if you have ANY comments/criticism please reply to this post!

ComboP is a way to combine multiple layouts in one workspace. I now have a portion of the workspace tabbed so that is where I can have multiple uzbl windows. On the other portion I have two terminals. One for Weechat and one for Mutt. These are situated in a tall layout that doesn’t resize so they will always have 50% of the available vertical space.

This would be useless to have on every workspace, I just want it on the one I have reserved for my browsing. So I went to look for another module and found it. It’s called PerWorkspace. It gives you the ability to set a layout for just one workspace and to have just one layout on a workspace, and multiple on all the others. It does make your layoutHook look like a mess.

Here is my layoutHook line, don’t forget the imports!:

,layoutHook = avoidStruts $ onWorkspace "www" (named "Tabbed" (windowNavigation (combineTwo (TwoPane 0.03 0.5) (tabbed shrinkText tabConfig) (Mirror (tiled))))) $ tiled ||| named "HintedTall" (hintedTile XMonad.Layout.HintedTile.Tall) ||| noBorders Full

I think this is a great example of what Xmonad can do. You can mold and craft it into anything you want and it will do it for you. I just love my setup at the moment. If only there was a good cli-feed reader that could synchronize with Google Reader…

Config Files

Uzbl is a project that aims to be a browser that follows the UNIX Philosophy, and I like it. On top of that, it’s real easy to extend the browser using scripts. Uzbl is built on top of Webkit, so it is standards compliant and it passes the acid3 test with flying colors. Off course, it is still alpha/beta so it’s not ultra stable but stable enough for me. And have I mentioned it is way lighter then Firefox? It starts in a snap and it uses a lot less memory.

My config can be found here and my scripts can be found here. Let me know if you have suggestions for my scripts!

You see:

• Arch Linux
• XMonad
• Dzen
• conky-cli
• opera
• urxvt
• irssi

I made some changes I planned on for a while. The biggest one is the switch form xmobar to dzen+conky-cli. Much more versatile. Also i cleaned up my xmonad.hs. It’s just how I wanted.
All my configs are found here.

Zsh is in ArchLinux’ extra repository. You can change from shell using the usermod command. You just do

usermod -s /bin/zsh USERNAME

You have to login and logout to activate the shell. Basic configuration is done in .zshrc. It works like .bashrc with some other commands. My .zshrc is bits and pieces from other people and form my .bashrc. You can find my .zshrc on my git branch. Gentoo’s documentation on zsh is rather good.

Since I now have succesfully installed and configured zsh I am looking for a new project, anyone tips? And also, i would love to see your .zshrc

Now i got a decent control panel, DirectAdmin instead of a home made thing that my previous ISP had, my email hasn’t got a hour delay and I can register different domains on one hosting package. So far I am extremely happy about sorcer. They respond very fast have a nice site, and are not too expensive. They are third in the top 25 of dutch hosting providers.

The way xmonad handles two (or more) screens is the way all window managers should do it. You have one set of workspaces. The screens are portals to these tags. So you can have workspace one on screen one and workspace two on screen two. Then you can have workspace two on screen one and workspace four on screen two. A picture to demonstrate:

The configuration file is easy to edit and I like it a lot. Even more so then the config file of awesome. It sounds scary to edit a haskell file but haskell is a nice, easy to understand language. My config file is found here.

So the reason I sticked with it were the multiple screen support, config file and the simplicity. I know a 300mb dependecy for a ~1 mb window manager is not really KISS but the way XMonad works is really KISS. That is because only manages your windows. You can choose youre own panel(if any). I like it!