Linux Configuration

One of things that comes with using a minimal window manager, such as i3 or dwm, is having to maintain additional configuration files that a desktop environment would normally take care of. Most of my configuration files are kept under version control, but I have not found a clean way to maintain some of the X11 config files across multiple machines. For the time being, it seems that the best solution is to simply take notes of how I have configured things.

Screen Resolution

The screen resolution can be set using the xrandr command. For a complicated multi monitor setup, it can be a lot easier to use a gui tool such as arandr which helps to write xrandr scripts.

High DPI

On both my laptop and desktop setups, I have higher than 1080p resolution. This usually means on Linux that the scaling is going to be off and everything will be way too tiny to read. To fix this issue, I modified the dpi setting in the ~/.Xresources file. For my laptop, which has a resolution of 2560x1600, I doubled the scaling by bumping up Xft.dpi from 96 to 192.

Xft.dpi:       192

Adjusting the dpi value alone fixes most of the resolution problems, but certain icons and font sizes do not always scale properly for all programs. Most of the configuration in the following sections come from the archwiki, but some comes from various other places.

GTK Theme/Icons

Since there are config files scattered around for both GTK2 and GTK3 programs, it can be a pain to manage. The easiest thing here seems to just use a GUI tool such as lxappearance. lxappearance will overwrite the files ~/.gtkrc-2.0 and /etc/gtk-2.0/gtkrc for GTK2 settings and ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini and /etc/gtk-3.0/settings.ini for GTK3 settings.

QT5

Increasing the icon size for a few QT programs was accomplished using the qt5 gui configuration tool which is launched using the qt5ct command. For the configuration tool to work properly, an environmental variable had to be set:

export QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME="qt5ct"

Additional GTK/QT5 Tweaks

The toolbar icons in programs such as pcmanfm were not fixable using lxappearance and had to be manually set. In order to make these settings last and not be overwritten by the GUI tool, the following was saved into ~/.gtkrc-2.0.mine

gtk-icon-sizes = "panel-menu=48,48:panel=48,48:gtk-menu=48,48\
:gtk-large-toolbar=48,48:gtk-small-toolbar=48,48:gtk-button=48,48"

To automatically adjust qt icons depending on the dpi:

export QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=1

morc_menu

Sometimes it is nice to use morc_menu rather than dmenu. Out of the box the text is completely squashed and illegible. To fix this, play with the value of avg_char_width.

line_height=20
avg_char_width=9
avg_err_char_width=10
menu_width=350
err_menu_width=350

I changed the value from 9 to 20 to get a nice looking morc menu.

morc_menu

Electron Apps

To increase the scaling of electron apps, you can start the program using the --force-device-scale-factor flag. This can be added to the .desktop file so that the the program uses the flag when launched with dmenu or rofi. The flag should be added to the line beginning with Exec=. For example, editing spotify’s desktop file at /usr/share/applications/spotify.desktop:

Exec=spotify --force-device-scale-factor=1.75 %U

Key remaps

To set the (useless) caps lock key as a (useful) control key, add the following to ~/.Xmodmap.

clear lock
clear control
keycode 66 = Control_L
add control = Control_L Control_R

Every time you plug in an external keyboard you will have to reload this file using xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap. This can be set to a keybinding using i3.

bindsym $mod+Shift+x exec --no-startup-id "xmodmap $HOME/.Xmodmap"

TODO: explore xkb as an alternative to Xresources

System Wide Emacs Keybindings

One of the great features of a Mac is the system wide Emacs keybindings. These are the essentials:

Key	Description
CTRL-a	Go to the beginning of the line
CTRL-e	Go to the end of the line
CTRL-k	Kill to the end of the line
CTRL-f	Go forward one character
CTRL-b	Go backward one character
CTRL-n	Go to the next line
CTRL-p	Go to the previous line
CTRL-w	Delete the word to the left
CTRL-u	Delete the entire line
CTRL-h	Delete one character left
CTRL-d	Delete one character right

To enable these: Add the following line to ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini

gtk-key-theme-name = Emacs

The equivalent for gtk-2 is to add the following line to ~/.gtkrc-2.0

gtk-key-theme-name = "Emacs"

Verbose Boot Up

I prefer to see the boot messages as my machine starts up rather than a black screen. To show the messages, open the file /etc/default/grub and look for a line like

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet udev.log_priority=3"

Remove the word quite from the line. Then run sudo update-grub. Note, this line will look slightly different if the disk is encrypted.