linuxPIPEpower

Once again I try to get a handle of my various dotfiles and configs. This time I take another stab at gnu stow as it is often recommended. I do not understand it.

Here's how I understand it: I'm supposed to manually move all my files into a new directory where the original are. So for ~ I make like this:

~
  - dotfiles
      - bash
         dot-bashrc
         dot-bash_profile
      - xdg
            - dot-config
                user-dirs.dirs
      - tealdeer
            - dot-config
                - tealdeer
                       config.toml

then cd ~/dotfiles && stow --dotfiles .

Then (if I very carefully created each directory tree) it will symlink those files back to where they came from like this:

~
  .bashrc
  .bash_profile
   - .config
        user-dirs.dirs
      - tealdeer
          config.toml

I don't really understand what this application is doing because setting up the dotfiles directory is a lot more work than making symlinks afterwards. Every instructions tells me to make up this directory structure by hand but that seems to tedious with so many configs; isn't there some kind of automation to it?

Once the symlinks are created then what?

• Tutorials don't really mention it but the actual manual gives me the impression this is a packager manager in some way and that's confusing. Lots of stuff about compiling

• I see about how to combine it with git. Tried git-oriented dotfile systems before and they just aren't practical for me. And again I don't see what stow contributing; git would be doing all the work there.

• Is there anything here about sharing configs between non-identical devices? Not everything can be copy/pasted exactly. Are you supposed to be making git branches or something?

The manual is not gentle enough to learn from scratch. OTOH there are very very short tutorials which offer little information.

I feel that I'm really missing the magic that's obvious to everyone else.

Title is TLDR. More info about what I'm trying to do below.

My daily driver computer is Laptop with an SSD. No possibility to expand.

So for storage of lots n lots of files, I have an old, low resource Desktop with a bunch of HDDs plugged in (mostly via USB).

I can access Desktop files via SSH/SFTP on the LAN. But it can be quite slow.

And sometimes (not too often; this isn't a main requirement) I take Laptop to use elsewhere. I do not plan to make Desktop available outside the network so I need to have a copy of required files on Laptop.

Therefor, sometimes I like to move the remote files from Desktop to Laptop to work on them. To make a sort of local cache. This could be individual files or directory trees.

But then I have a mess of duplication. Sometimes I forget to put the files back.

Seems like Laptop could be a lot more clever than I am and help with this. Like could it always fetch a remote file which is being edited and save it locally?

Is there any way to have Laptop fetch files, information about file trees, etc, located on Desktop when needed and smartly put them back after editing?

Or even keep some stuff around. Like lists of files, attributes, thumbnails etc. Even browsing the directory tree on Desktop can be slow sometimes.

I am not sure what this would be called.

Ideas and tools I am already comfortable with:

• rsync is the most obvious foundation to work from but I am not sure exactly what would be the best configuration and how to manage it.

• luckybackup is my favorite rsync GUI front end; it lets you save profiles, jobs etc which is sweet

• freeFileSync is another GUI front end I've used but I am preferring lucky/rsync these days

• I don't think git is a viable solution here because there are already git directories included, there are many non-text files, and some of the directory trees are so large that they would cause git to choke looking at all the files.

• syncthing might work. I've been having issues with it lately but I may have gotten these ironed out.

Something a little more transparent than the above would be cool but I am not sure if that exists?

Any help appreciated even just idea on what to web search for because I am stumped even on that.

For a given device, sometimes one linux distro perfectly supports a hardware component. Then if I switch distros, the same component no longer functions at all, or is very buggy.

How do I find out what the difference is?

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/13814482

I just noticed that eza can now display total disk space used by directories!

I think this is pretty cool. I wanted it for a long time.

There are other ways to get the information of course. But having it integrated with all the other options for listing directories is fab. eza has features like --git-awareness, --tree display, clickable --hyperlink, filetype --icons and other display, permissions, dates, ownerships, and other stuff. being able to mash everything together in any arbitrary way which is useful is handy. And of course you can --sort=size

docs:

  --total-size               show the size of a directory as the size of all
                             files and directories inside (unix only)

It also (optionally) color codes the information. Values measures in kb, mb, and gb are clear. Here is a screenshot to show that:

eza --long -h --total-size --sort=oldest --no-permissions --no-user

Of course it take a little while to load large directories so you will not want to use by default.

Looks like it was first implemented Oct 2023 with some fixes since then. (Changelog). PR #533 - feat: added recursive directory parser with `--total-size` flag by Xemptuous

Question: Is there any auto-correct that works globally in all (or at least, many) applications? Particularly non-terminal. So for example firefox (like this text box I'm typing into), chat, text editors, word processors etc?

Example: I often type "teh" when I meant "the". I would like to have that change automagically.

I'm sure somewhere in my life (not in linux

maybe on mac?) I had the ability to right click on a red-underlined misspelled word in any application and select "always change this fix this to.." and then it would.

Autokey is the only close suggestion I can find. But I guess you have to tell it about every single replacement through the configuration? Are there any pre-made configurations of common misspellings?

How is the performance if you end up with dozens, hundreds, of phrases for it to look out for?

Not looking for: a code linter, command line corrections or grammerly which are the suggestions I have found when searching.

I have a multiple user linux system. Well actually a couple of them. They are running different distros which are arch-based, debian-based and fedora-based.

I want to globally use non-executable components not available via my system's package manager. Such as themes, icons, cursors, wallpapers and sounds.

Some of them are my own original work that I manage in git repos. Others are downloaded as packages/collections. If there is a git repo available I prefer to clone because it can theoretically be updated by pulling. And sometimes I make my own forks or branches of other people's work. So it's really a mix.

I want to keep these in a totally separate area where no package manager will go. So that it is portable and can be backed up / copied between systems without confusion. Which is why I don't want to use /usr/local.

I also want to be able to add/edit in this area without su to root. So that I can easily modify or add items which then can be accessed by all users. Also a reason to avoid /usr/local

I tried making a directory like /home/shared/themes then symlinking ~/.themes in different users to that. It sometimes worked OK but I ran into permissions issues. Git really didn't seem to like sharing repos between users. I can live with only using a single user to edit the repos but it didn't like having permissions recursively changed to even allow access.

Is there a way to tell linux to look in a custom location for these resources for every user on the system? I also still want it to look in the normal places so I can use the package managers when possible.

fonts - once solved

On one install, I found a way to add a system-wide custom font directory though I am not able to recall how that was done. I believe it had to do with xorg or x11 config files. I can't seem to find in my shell histories how it was done but I will look some more. I do recall the method was highly specific to fonts and didn't appear to be transferable to other resources.

I accidentally removed a xubuntu live usb from the computer while it was running but it seems to be working just fine. I can even launch applications that werent already open.

Is that expected? I have always thought you need to be careful to avoid bumping the usb drive or otherwise disturbing it.

Where is everything being stored? In RAM? Is the whole contents of the usb copied into RAM or just some parts?

Edit: tried it with manjaro and it fell apart. All kinds of never before seen errors. Replacing the usb didnt fix it. Couldnt even shut down the machine, had to hard power off.

I really like advance find and replace in kate editor. You can optionally use regex and operate on multiple files.

Very importantly it has a robust preview changes ability. it is comfortable to use even with lots of hits, lots of files. So you do not need to apply a bunch of changes and hope you considered every permutation as with a cli tool like sed.

One thing that would really improve my life would be a tool like this which allows you to save search queries and options.

Don't work for me:

• Kate has a popup for history in the fields which is somewhat helpful but limited. When trying out different queries you don't have a way to remember which one actually worked so going by the history just ends in repeating the same errors over and over. Also it doesn't match the "find" and "replace" fields nor does it associate them with the other options like directory, etc.

• Keeping notes in a text file is of course possible but cumbersome. I would like the computer to do work like that for me.

For single file searches regex101.com (non floss) and regexr.com (GPLv3) are great in-browser tools for learning and you can save the search. But to operate locally on many files, it doesn't work.

Does anyone know any tools that do anything like this? Can find various utilities which operate on file names but I am looking for file content. Certainly this exists ya?

(Post image is screenshot from Kate website of Kate on windows.)

I am learning some bash scripting.

I am interested to learn about getting input for my scripts via a GUI interface. It seems that yad (forked from zenity) is the most robust tool for this. (But if there is a better choice I would like to hear about it too.)

Is it possible to obtain 2 or more named variables using yad? Not just getting the values based on their positions ($1, $2, etc), with awk. See "What doesn't work" spoiler for those.

inputStr=$(zenity --entry --title="My Title" --text="My Text:")

jpgfile=$(echo $OUTPUT | awk 'BEGIN {FS="," } { print $1 }')

For a simple example, I want to ask the user for a file name and some content. Creating the dialogue is like this:

yad --title "Create a file" --form --field="File name" --field="Content"

If you fill both fields the output in the terminal is file|this is some text|. How do I get them into variables like $filename and $filecontent? So then I can finish the script like this:

touch "$filename"
echo "$filecontent" > $filename

Is this possible??? I do not find it anywhere. I looked though all kinds of websites like YAD Guide, yad man page, smokey01. Maybe I missed something. On yaddemo I read about bash arrays and it seemed to come close but I couldn't quite piece it together.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/9585677

My dream: I want a way to arbitrarily close and later open groups of applications including their states such as open files, window arrangement, scrollback, even undo histories etc. So working on a specific project I can close everything neatly and return to it later.

In my research/experiments here is what I come up with, do you agree?:

1. in the terminal-only environment this would be tmux or another multiplexer

2. But when you start including GUI applications (which I must), then it is something else that doesn't exactly exist

3. Applications store their current states in a variety of places and some of them don't really do restoring in any way so it would be hard to force.

4. the best option for this is something like xpra where you can have multiple sessions. If you had a machine that stayed powered-on all the time it might be possible to create sessions, log in remotely and use them that way.

5. Using xpra or similar the sessions are never really actually closed. You would only close the connection from the local machine. If the machine faces a power off then too bad. As far as I can se there is basically no way to accomplish this goal where power-offs are accommodated.

I have tried some remote-login options but they are too slow for normal use. I tend to have pretty low-end hardware running (because so far it works for most things) so maybe if I upgraded it would improve.

1. is it plausible?
2. how to estimate hardware/performance needs of host, client and LAN? anything else to consider?

I typically use manjaro + XFCE but would be willing to try something different to accomplish the goal. I only want to do this locally on LAN not remotely.

re XFCE session manager

XFCE has session management but the majority of programs don't totally work with. Like maybe the application will re-open when the session is restored but no files will be open even if they were when session was saved. Or distribution through workspaces, window size etc will not be restored.

I really like comparison tables on wikipedia but find them hard to navigate.

For example: Comparison of web browsers > General Information

Say I want a web browser for Linux which has been recently updated. I can sort by the "Platform" column, or by "Latest release: Date" but not both.

Sometimes tables can be very wide and/or very tall. Once you get to scrolling it is impossible to see either the row or column headings. So then you can't tell where you even are in the table. Example: Table of AMD processors Also they can have complex structures with merged headings and content.

Ideally I would like to apply some basic spreadsheet-type operations like hiding rows/columns, filtering, sorting by multiple columns etc. Even if there was a way to easily get the table into an actual spreadsheet that would be helpful. I tried some extensions that export tables to other formats but nothing worked without a lot of cleanup.

Is there some kind of trick or tool or extension that makes these ginormous tables useful? I can't tell how people even add information to these things, they are so large.