I'd like to setup a NixOS machine that runs in my flat to host my blog and other
projects. For now it's a slow Acer running Manjaro Linux. I'm hoping that I can
install NixOS on it remotely over SSH. But first! SSH access...
I setup port forwarding from my router to this machine for:
- HTTP
- HTTPS
- SSH
After running `systemctl --user enable lieer-google.timer`, systemctl created a
symlink pointing from timers.target.wants -> ../lieer-google.timer. I'm not sure
if tracking symlinks in a git repository is such a useful idea.
This commit reminds me that I could and should be using Nix to better manage
symlink creation and destruction.
I'm borrowing from @tazjin's dotfiles, which are stored in Git on Borg. When you
call `nix-build ~/briefcase/mail`, result will output a systemd units, which you
should move to ~/.config/systemd/user/.
The path to `gmi`, which is Lieer's executable, exists in /nix/store, and you
can read it from the systemd unit file (i.e. lieer-google.service). Lieer
synchronizes notmuch with Gmail and Gmail with notmuch.
Here's a general sequence of commands that I ran to set everything up. Special
thank you to @tazjin for helping me with all of this. These steps are not
certified as a tutorial; I'm recalling them from memory. When I set this up
things didn't work as expected immediately and I had to troubleshoot.
```shell
> mkdir -p ~/mail/account.google
> cd ~/mail/account.google
> nix-env -iA nixpkgs.notmuch
> notmuch setup
> nix-build ~/briefcase/mail
> cp ./result/lieer-google.{service,timer} ~/.config/systemd/user
> rm ./result
> systemctl --user cat lieer-google
...copy the /nix/store path to gmi...
> notmuch new
> /nix/store/gmi init
...follow the OAuth login flow...
>
```
Unknowns?
- Do I need to call `systemctl --user start lieer-google` at startup? Or should
I move these units to user/default.target.wants?
- Can I send email from notmuch?
- How do I use notmuch to delete email? To respond to emails? To do anything?
Todo:
- Once this configuration stabilizes, I should package everything with Nix.
I previously had an alias defined as `simple_vim`, which would start an instance
of Vim with a bare bones config. I had a to-do to Nixify it. That is
now (mostly) to-done.
When I try and install it with `nix-env -f ~/briefcase -iA tools.simple_vim`,
Nix fails and says that pkgs.stdenv is undefined. I will need to fix this one
day, but it is neither important nor urgent...
When I ran `pass show some/password`, gpg, which uses pinentry would start its
ncurses password prompt. For many this wouldn't be a problem but my current
vterm version cannot send the <return> key to ncurses, so once that prompt
appears, I cannot get rid of it without C-c and killing the shell. For a day or
more I just opened suffered through this.
Today I dug more into the issue and when I ran `pinentry --version` it warned
that it couldn't connect to DBUS. After searching for more information on this,
people with similar issues recommended starting their window managers with
`dbus-launch`. I previously started Emacs with `dbus-launch`, but only because
some i3 documentation told me to do so and I just copied them. Then I switched
to EXWM and copied that pattern over. A friend of mine uses EXWM and starts his
without calling `dbus-launch` but `exec emacs`. I mirrored this thinking that I
no longer needed `dbus-launch`. What I didn't know, however, was that this
friend was using a Nix-built Emacs (like me) except that his wrapped a native
Emacs installation while mine doesn't. His natively wrapped Emacs installation
has the proper variables set to interact with dbus and other important Linuxy
things that I don't fully understand. Since I'm using a Nix-built Emacs, some of
my variables are unset or set to different values than programs expect. This is
why when I try and start `gnome-terminal` or `terminator`, they refuse to start
and warn about many unset or incorrectly variables and not being able to bind to
sockets, etc.
This change reverts back to using `dbus-launch` until I have a better
understanding of Linux, Nix, etc.
This does two things:
1. Starts lorri daemon
2. Moves ssh-agent and docker daemon startup calls to ~/.profile
I'm still not entirely sure when ~/.profile is evaluated... I'd like to use
systemd to startup and manage these background services, but I currently don't
have a strong enough desire to do this.
dkish was an idea to quickly create REPLs for all sorts of languages like
Haskell, Elixir, Clojure. I haven't used these, and if I started wanting these
with my newfound comfort with Nix, I think I'd reach for that instead.
Support a Mercurial alias for listing the files that have changed on a
particular branch.
This commit is particularly noisy because I reformatted the above aliases to
align with the new width.
Renaming my mono-repo briefcase.
I first introduced this commit in master, but it introduced a bug where one of
two things would happen:
1. Emacs wouldn't start and would crash X.
2. Emacs would start but my keyboard wouldn't work.
I learned some valuable debugging skills in the process. Here are some of them:
When my keyboard was broken, I wanted to control my computer using my
laptop. Thankfully this is possible by using `x2x`, which forward X events from
the SSH client to the SSH host.
```shell
> # I'm unsure if this is the *exact* command
> ssh -X desktop x2x -west :0.0
```
Git commit-local bisecting. I didn't need to do a `git bisect` because I knew
which commit introduced the bug; it was HEAD, master. But -- as you can see from
the size of this commit -- there are many changes involved. I wanted to binary
search through the changes, so I did the following workflow using `magit`:
- git reset --soft HEAD^
- git stash 1/2 of the files changed
- re-run `nix-env -f ~/briefcase/emacs -i`
- restart X session
- If the problem persists, the bug exists in the non-stashed files. Repeat the
process until you find the bug.
In my case, the bug was pretty benign. Calling `(exwm/switch "Dotfiles")` at the
bottom of `window-manager.el` was failing because "Dotfiles" is the name of a
non-existent workspace; it should've been `(exwm/switch "Briefcase")`.
There may have been more problems. I changed a few other things along the way,
including exposing the env vars BRIEFCASE to `wpcarros-emacs` inside of
`emacs/default.nix`.
The important part is that this was a valuable learning opportunity, and I'm
glad that I'm walking away from the two days of "lost productivity" feeling
actually productive.
I'm using a Makefile until I can remember the command:
```shell
> nix-env -f . -i
```
This will install (i.e. `-i`) any derivations instantiated from the Nix
expression resolvable by `-f`. Ideally the incantation will look something like
this:
```shell
> nix-env -f '<universe>' -iA emacs
```
Informing `nix-env` to install all of the derivations created by the expression
at attribute `emacs` in my `<universe>` repository. For now two things are
preventing this:
1. `emacs` isn't an attribute in my top-level expression defined in the
`default.nix`.
2. If I do add `emacs` as an attribute and call the above command, my usage of
`readTree` results in `pkgs` missing `.lib` and a few other stdlib commands
that are available in `(import <nixpkgs> {})`.
A fix for both of these should be forthcoming.
I've been using Fish consistently for about a month now, and I don't see myself
switching back to ZSH. Some of the code from this commit should be published. I
may get around to that one day. Before I did that, I would need to clean it up
and document it, which I won't be doing today.
Thank you, ZSH, for your service.
I recently changed my hostname for my desktop and laptop from
wpcarro.lon.corp.google.com -> zeno.lon.corp.google.com
wpcarro2 -> seneca
If you're curious, the names Zeno and Seneca come from famous Stoic
philosophers. As you can see from this commit, my configuration depends on the
values of these hostnames.
Immediately impacted:
- .profile
- device.el
Not immediately impacted:
- configs/install
- configs/uninstall
- .ssh/config
- .zshrc*
* As a side note, I should stop supporting ZSH.
Using an .envrc file helps me DRY up some of my configuration. Ideally I should
only need to make changes to the .envrc file and then expect everything to work
as expected. Let's see how that goes.
Update code that depends on my mono-repo being named "mono". I've renamed it to
"universe", which explains the changes in this commit.
TODO: Merge dotfiles into universe.
I'm having trouble debugging why `pgrep emacs` returns two PIDs instead of just
one. Additionally when I call `emacsclient .` on the command line, I see a
message...
"Waiting for Emacs..."
...but when I cycle through all of my workspaces, I don't see any active
buffers. This commit is part of a larger debugging effort to get this working as
expected.
The end goal is to have some functions that help me manage my Monzo and YNAB
accounts. YNAB (i.e. youneedabudget.com) doesn't support Monzo
integrations. However, both services offer APIs. Here I'm sketching ideas for
what the API integrations might look like. Coming soon: monzo.el.
Not adding it as a top-level dependency since maybe.el depends on on
prelude.el. This shouldn't be a circular dependency when the requirement happens
in the function's scope though.
Remove `dbus-launch` and prefer simply `exec emacs`. Add `--no-site-file` and
`--no-site-lisp` flags.
Temporarily disable `google-stuff.el` because it's unavailable with the
`--no-site-lisp` flag.
This should all be fixed when I fully nixify my Emacs.
Why?
- `company-mode` is too noisy in IRC buffers.
- `auto-fill-mode` inserts newline characters that end up each being their own
message, which means that I make more noise than I should in IRC.
Wrapping the `nix eval` incantation in a fish function for two reasons:
1. Document that this is how to evaluate Nix from a file.
2. Provide a more ergonomic way of evaluating Nix from a file.
This takes care of my outstanding TODO of understanding why something ivy was
being used and other times it wasn't. It turns out that there is a generic
`completing-read` function that many Emacs packages consume. `ivy-mode` ensures
that when that function is called it is used instead of the default Emacs
completing package.
I'm still unsure of the difference between ivy and counsel. My best guess
currently is that counsel is the narrowing framework and ivy is the integration
of the narrowing framework with `completing-read`. Swiper must be the
integration with incremental {forward,backward} search.
`dired-display-file` opens the file in another window but does not focus that
window. `dired-find-file-other-window` does what `dired-display-file` does
except it focuses that window.
This function builds a version of SBCL using `nix.buildLisp` and points `sly` to
the built executable. The result is a REPL with access to your project's
dependencies, which is quite useful. One drawback at the moment is that if new
dependencies are added to the project, I think I need to rebuild SBCL using nix
and restart sly.
Since I spend a decent amount of time scouring the excellent work of my
colleague, @tazjin, I figured having some functions and KBDs setup to make this
work cheaper would be beneficial.
Also preferring the name `"depot"` to `"tazjins-depot"`. I don't think the
namespace `"tazjin-"` is useful at this time. I'm considering renaming my
mono-repo `"universe"`... a bit grandiose, but hey, let me get my kicks.
I'd like to limit the available snippets to those snippets that I have
explicitly defined. I ran into this problem when defining the `defpackage`
snippet for `lisp-mode`; it appeared that another snippet for `defpackage`
existed somewhere on my machine.
Since I'm new to the CL world, snippets are a useful note-taking analogue with
the added benefit of potentially speeding up my workflow should the
muscle-memory set.
