TIL: gpg-agent sets the SSH_AUTH_SOCK and other values. Since I already use
home-manager to start gpg-agent and SSH has been functioning without issues, I'm
removing the obsolete ssh-agent code.
I patched home-manager locally to support fzf keybindings for fish. I will PR
this into home-manager, but I haven't yet, which means that my home.nix file
depends on my local ~/home-manager.
I've been consistently using vterm enough that I don't think I will change
shells anytime soon. Couple this with my previous commit where I hint that I'd
like to curb all terminal usage if possible, and it seems unlikely that I'll
want to keep this terminator configuration.
As I pruned increasingly more dependencies, the few dependencies that desktop
and laptop hosted were too trivial for me to justify supporting. And so, I no
longer support them.
Support commonly used programs like fd, exa, bat, etc.
For now, I'm unsure how to manage the programs in my emacs/default.nix with my
home.nix. I'll wait until I have a stronger opinion to handle this.
Prefer starting lorri with home-manager.
Note: I could have removed the `systemctl --user start lorri.service` line
before switching to home-manager by calling `systemctl --user enable
lorri.service`. This would have made a symlink in
`~/.config/systemd/user/default.target.wants`.
I haven't used Tmux for months.
I also suspect that using the terminal in general may be a crutch. Ideally I
could replace everything I do in the terminal with Emacs analogues. Perhaps one
month I'll force myself to work without a terminal to see what happens.
While I do still technically own a Google cloudtop device, I haven't used it in
at least six months. In the interest of pruning non-critical dependencies, I'm
deleting it. I can alway restore it thanks to Git.
I didn't port everything from .ssh/config to home-manager. I omitted a few hosts
that I don't connect to anymore. I also omitted the `corp-ssh-helper`
configuration.
Today I wrote myself a custom fish prompt. It's mostly what I'd like, but I'd
like to finely tune it a bit. I'd like to create a separate repository to
release this. In that repository, I'll explain why I wrote this.
Months ago when I was revisiting Nix, I decided to nixify my fish
configuration. This was a useful learning exercise. I've had two config.fish
files floating around this repository ever since then. I sometimes update one
and other times I update the other. I'm consolidating these files into one, so I
that this is no longer as issue.
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.
