My Full Coding Setup - Arch Linux & Software

Key Takeaways

I recently made a video where I showed you guys my entire coding setup in terms of hardware. I showed you my desk, my monitors, my chair, and even my PC specs. Today, I'll do the same thing on a software level. I'm going to show you my operating system, all my config files, and all the software I use on a regular basis. If you like this video, let me know by hitting the like button and subscribing. But now, let us get right into it. [Music] All right. So, the first thing you see right away is I use Arch by the way. This even rhymed. So, yes, I'm using mainline Arch Linux. If you want to quickly have a summary of the most important tools here in the terminal, fast fetch, this is the output. You can skim it as a spoiler for this video. Now, one thing that's important to mention is this video is not going to be a setup guide. I'm not going to show you how you can reproduce my config. However, on my GitHub, you will find this config files repository. If you click on it, you can see here in the Arch config directory all the config files that are relevant or almost all the config files that are relevant for the various tools I use on my system. Also, I'm not going to cover tools like Python or Docker or Git. Obviously, I'm using these tools as a developer. So, these are things that I'm not even going to mention. Also, I'm not going to mention settings like GTK settings or QT settings or something like this. And I'm not going to go into any of the drivers or kernels or stuff like that. But yeah, so let us get started with the essentials. The operating system is Arch Linux. What I'm running here as a compositor and tiling window manager is Hyperland. This is what you see here. When I spam my terminal combination, hyperland is this tiling window manager. I can swap these windows. I can use even my mouse. I can also get them into floating mode like this if I want to. So this is Hyperland and it's running Wayland. Wayand is the alternative to X11. And this is one thing that I can recommend to everybody who struggles with X11 because I had some issues. The videos that I played were not smooth. If I played some video games, they were not smooth. Scrolling was laggy. All of this was fixed when I switched to Hyperland or Wayland in general. So yeah, we can take a look at my Hyperland config. Not in too much detail here. As I mentioned, you can find everything on my GitHub. But essentially what I have here is I have three monitors. And my setup is a little bit exotic because what I do is I don't treat workspaces the way that Hyperland treats workspaces by default. For me, one configuration of screen 1, 2, and three is one workspace, which means if I switch to another workspace, all three of my monitors are being switched. Now, I'm not going to go into the setup details here, but basically I have here this setup with all the workspaces here being mapped to specific monitors. So 1 47 every third workspace is this monitor. Every other third workspace is this monitor. And then we have uh the last monitor. But basically when I make a key combination you can see what happens. So super one spawns 1 2 3. Super 2 spawns 4 5 6. So basically when I switch the workspaces I'm switching all three monitors at the same time. I just prefer it that way. Besides that, I have some keybinds in here. I'm not going to cover the applications yet since I'm going to talk about them when I get to them. But basically, my super B opens up my browser. My super X locks my screen. Super C opens up cursor. Super uh M opens up Thunderbird to my mailing client. Super O opens up Obsidian for notetaking. With Super Q, I close Windows. With Super D, I have this D menu, which is Woi as far as I remember. There you go. So here basically I can run any application like discord for example and that's basically it with super enter I open up a terminal and if I want to switch between if I want to switch the focus between the individual windows I can do that with the arrow keys or I can also do that with H and L for left and right and J and K for up and down or I should say down and up. So yeah if you go into my hyper directory here in the config directory you can see I'm using hyper idle for basically going to sleep if I'm not doing anything. I'm using hyper lock to lock the screen. Hyper paper for the wallpaper and then I have of course hyperland itself. Also what you can see up here is way my config for way is kind of exotic not because of the stuff that I have here. These are very basic indicators and icons but because of how the workspaces are switched because what you see is again I explained one workspace is three screens or three workspaces actually. And because of this I have a script that manages all of this. This is actually vibe coded. So, uh, I don't really know what's happening precisely, but essentially what I'm doing is I'm switching all of them at the same time. I'm also checking if there's any open window there, if there's anything active there. And if yes, I mark them in a certain color. So, right now, if I go to five, you can see that's my envelope. So, my mailing tab, so to say. If I open up a terminal here and I go back to one, you can see that this is now blue. This is because there is an active window there. If I close it, go back, it's white. And the active tab is always white. That's the idea. Besides that, I have here my running applications, my internet connection, my Bluetooth connection, my disc usage, my CPU usage, RAM usage, volume. I can scroll here, my date and time. In general, I'm not too strict when it comes to using the different tabs. I use them basically for everything. The only thing I always try to do is if I'm having some music running, I'm going to the last one. So to super zero and I'm opening Spotify or YouTube. If I'm doing some coding, usually I have some browser opened up here in the main page. Then the browser for testing an application if it's a web application on the third tab and on the second one I'm usually coding. The fourth one is usually for keeping terminals running for Jupyter Lab for example or for some uh Docker application where I'm monitoring the logs. So this is just the terminal screen or the logging screen. Five is usually for mails. Six is for GitHub. Seven should be for video editing. I'm never using seven actually. So I don't know why I have it. Actually 7, 8, and 9. I never use them. Even when I play games, I usually do it on one. So yeah, it's more like a decorative thing. For the terminal itself, I'm using elacrity. This is my elacrity config. You can also find it on GitHub. I'm using Jet Brains Mono Nerd Font for everything almost. And the shell here is Zshell to be precise. Oh my Zshell. Yeah, I've heard it's not optimal, but I like it. I actually have a tutorial where I show you how to set up Zshell the way I have it. Now, one of the most central applications on my system is obviously Neoim. So, in my case, the shortcut NV. And this is basically the editor I use for everything. Unless I need some AI help, for example, because I'm doing some front-end designing where I'm not going to code the stuff myself, then I'm using cursor because it's just better for working with AI. But if I'm not using AI, I'm always working in Neoim. Covering my Neoim config probably requires a video on its own, but I can quickly show you the plugins I have here. The NCF, which is opening here, my Neovim config. And the plugins are the following. I have this buffer line. I have buff delete. I have float term which is basically just a floating terminal here if I want to use it. I've heard that there's a better alternative probably I have to switch. I have lazy git which I almost never use. I have Luine. I have envap I think this was for debugging. I'm also not using this one really. I think I even have a video on it on my channel. Nvim tree is what you see here on the left side. One dark is the theme. Telescope is for looking for stuff. for example file search here where I can do for example I don't know float term where actually this is looking in files if I want to find files I have to do ff and then I can do float term for example but I think this goes from the directory where I opened this not from the directory where I am so yeah it's a bit buggy my config is also not perfect and then I have to-do comments tree sitter and I have all the autocomp completion stuff here in lsp bindings yeah again I'm not going to cover this in too much detail but I'm using neo of them basically whenever I'm not using AI tools. Now, something I cannot show you because I would have to be locked out is my greeter, which is L Y. I hope this is how you pronounce it. It's a very lightweight login screen essentially where you just have your uh environment way i3 like hyperland i3 whatever you log in your password. It's a very lightweight display manager or greeter. Then I also have something interesting which is an emoji keyboard so to say or a script. If I want to type an emoji, what I do is I do super and dot and then it opens up this dmen like selection and I can do something like laugh and then I can pick this and I can just paste it here. Now in this case it doesn't display the emojis in the terminal properly. But if I do something else like for example let's go with this one it will display it because jet brains mono displays it like this. If I have WhatsApp opened up it's going to use the proper emoji. So I have this because it's quite useful. It's also part of my GitHub. It's also not something I written myself. It's actually a script that I got from some other GitHub repository. This this guy here files actually it's not GitHub. It's his website and I adjusted it to my needs. Basically, I have all the emojis here with keywords. And if I type one of the keywords, then I get the emoji. For example, person or because I'm using BJJ quite often, I have it associated with wrestling. So, I get the wrestling emoji whenever I type BJJ. What else am I using? I am using of course since I'm using Arch also Pac-Man which is the default package manager. But what I'm using more often is Yay which is the Arch Linux helper or AUR helper. So basically if I just type yay it updates all my packages. If I do yay- s I can pull packages from the Arch user repository and I can also install packages that are default Arch packages. So I guess I use this once or twice a day. Now I said I'm not going to go into drivers. So, I'm not going to explain all the sound setup and everything, but I'm using not sure what it's called. Pavu control, PAVU control for my playback, output devices, input devices, configuration, stuff like this. And I think I'm using Bluetooth manager for managing Bluetooth. This this sort of tool here, Bluetooth manager, I think. So, I think that's it for the essential Linux tools. Let us move on to the terminal here. Of course, I'm using many different tools. I'm also not going to cover all of them, just a few that come to mind here. uh btop. I'm using btop whenever I need to kill a process. Whenever I'm looking for a process, for example, if I wanted to kill now my uh OBS recording, I would type OBS, I would go here, I would do shift K and I would just kill this process. Uh I have the the Vim key bindings, which is why I have to do shift K. But basically, yeah, if I go to something like Btop, I can kill BTOP like this. I would have to say yes, and it would kill the process. I think this is a very nice task manager, if you want to call it that. Besides that, I'm using a lot of auto jumper. This is a tool where you can just use cd normally. Then it recognizes the directories that you go to very often. And now if I want to go to my tutorial directory, which is located in documents, programming, neural 9, and then tutorial, I can just say j toot or t for tutorial. And there I am in my tutorial directory. I can do the same thing with my prepared directory here. And in here, I can use the next tool, which is rip grab. If I know that I'm looking for a certain line of code, I can just type RG or certain line of text that occurs in any document in prepared, I can just type RG. Actually, let me run this somewhere else in a safe repository like YouTube tutorials. Here I can run RG and I can say OpenAI for example, and I will get all the places where the OpenAI key is loaded. I also covered this in one of my terminal tools videos. Then I'm also using EXA, which is basically ls. I'm using Exa, but I'm actually using it SLS. So, it's just a mapping, which is a more advanced rustbased LS with better coloring and better performance. And of course, in many of my videos, you see me when I'm doing some tutorial, you see me using UV. I do UV init UV at this is just my Python package manager. I use it in basically every project. It's super fast and I really like it. I have multiple videos on it as well. So, let us move on now to the essential guey software. I am using Thunar as a file manager or file explorer. So if I do supern it opens Thunar. Why is it super N? It's because originally I was using Nautilus. So I mapped it to N and then I stickked with N even though I'm using Thuner nowadays. But yeah, this is basically the XFCE file manager. Nothing too fancy about it. Basic basic thing. Now for PDFs, I'm using Ocular. So I can either use it in a command line or I can just double click a PDF in Thunar. But basically this is the thing that I use to read papers or whatever I'm reading to open up PDF documents. Ocular I like it because it has Vim binding. So right now I'm pressing J and K to go down and up which is quite convenient. I can also do GG to go or actually I cannot do GG. I think there was a way in which I could do GG and G to go to the to the top and to the bottom but I don't have it set up here. But yeah, it's a customizable very nice PDF reader. To open videos I use MPV. So, if I take something like my Stripe crash course here, I double click it. I hope you don't hear that because that's pretty loud. Uh, but basically, this is what I use to watch videos. I can also use the key bindings for speeding up, slowing down, and so on. Quite convenient, quite minimal, quite vimike. For opening images, like thumbnails, for example, I use Mirage, which is, I think, the most lightweight choice. I'm not sure. Yeah, just I don't use that very often, but there you go. So, to quickly recap, so you have also some logos. I'm using Thunar. Actually, Thunar is not properly shown here. I'm using Ocular. I'm using MPV. I'm using Mirage. And for the browser, I'm using Chrome just because it works better. I would like to use Firefox, but every time I use Firefox, stuff is laggy, stuff doesn't work, stuff is not supported, stuff doesn't load. And it's not Firefox's fault, I think. It's just that Chrome has a very strong market standing, let's say, in the browser business. But I also have Firefox installed. For mail, I use Thunderbird. This is my email client. I have all my mailboxes connected there with automated filters and everything. Not going to show it here because I don't want to show my mails, but basically, this is what I use for my emailing. Another software that is quite essential, but more behind the scenes or meta is Gnome keyring. So, this is something I didn't even realize I needed before I needed it because when I installed Arch, I had to constantly log into services again and again, no matter how many times I did it, until I realized, okay, you need some application to manage your credentials. So, I'm using Gnome keying. As I mentioned, I'm also using cursor whenever I'm doing front-end stuff or stuff where I don't have to think too much, stuff where I had to type too much, but not really uh risky stuff. Then for communications, I'm using Slack for business purposes and Discord for private calls or for also my Discord community server which you can join. I know right now there's not too much going on there. At some point I'm going to revive it hopefully. But yeah, I have a Discord community server. I also talk to friends via Discord and I'm also using Slack for professional purposes for business stuff. So I think that's it for the essential software and the communication software. Now I would like to talk about the software that I use for video making. On the one hand, we obviously have OBS, which is what I'm running right now to record. Uh, this is what I always use for recording. And I think I have fixed an audio issue that I had in the past by disabling the desktop sound. But yeah, this is what I use for recording. For editing, I'm using Shotcut. Shotcut is a very minimal software. But basically, if I open up any project here, like for example, the new Python, then you can see here all my assets. This is I think before editing all the graphics. I'm not having the most efficient workflow here. Uh what I usually do is I cut the video together to remove all the pauses and everything that destroys the flow. And then I have a final version of everything where I actually introduce all the assets like everything like this logo here or this pop-up here and all the previews here and everything. So I do that basically in post-processing with Shotcut. I don't think that Shotcut is necessarily a very good software. I think it's simple and easy and I'm not a video editing guy. I think if you know what you're doing and if you want to have proper features, you probably use something like Da Vinci Resolve or you use Caden Live or some other software, but Shotcut is like the perfect software for someone who doesn't know what they're doing. Besides that, occasionally I will use for image editing. Usually I don't do that. Usually I use Canva. So this is how I usually design my thumbnails. I have a bunch of them here with different concepts, different ideas of what I could be doing. And then I just pick the ones I like the best and yeah, I just download them. This is how I do my thumbnails for the most part. And if I need something fancy like some skew or some transformation, I I do it in And also occasionally if I record a video where I have to do the voice over afterwards, like for example my hardware video, I use Audacity to record the audio. So just a very simple tool. I'm not sure if it works now when I'm recording, but basically, yeah, I think it works. It records my sound and then I can play and listen to it. And also, you guys know it in many videos where I try to explain something that is a bit more complex. I use my paint. My paint allows me to sketch stuff to explain stuff to you guys, especially mathematics. And usually I also use my drawing tablet which I covered in the hardware video. And I think that's it for my essential software, my business software, my coding software, and my recording software. And now I would just cover everything that I would consider the rest or other software. So on the one hand of course I have Spotify to listen to music or sometimes I'm just listening on YouTube. I'm using KeyPass as my password manager. So I have a database with all my passwords with a very secure master password and then if I need something I basically just copy paste it from there. I have FSA which I used to use a lot but I don't use anymore that much. It's basically a tool where you can connect. I don't even have a database here on Arch, but you basically add some folders and then you have this efficient index search. Usually what I do is if I really need to search for something like prep deer for example here, I'll do fuzzy finder in the command line and I will just look for it. Or if I uh need to also look for files that are hidden, I will do find and then pipe it into fuzzy finder something like this and then look for all the N files orvn directories here. So yeah, I don't use f search that often. What I use occasionally is QDR stat. QR stat is basically a tool that allows you to scan a directory or the entire system. Let me try it on something small. For example, my prepared directory here. What it basically does is it analyzes everything. This doesn't look now too interesting because yeah, it's basically all just uh a data set for EEG. But yeah, you can see all the files. You can see the different file types. And I can notice for example, this is a very large file. What is this? This is some torch package. So this is actually a virtual environment. Probably I should delete that because it takes up a lot of space. And if you do that for your entire operating system you or for your entire system, you actually see where you have stuff that eats up a lot of space. And I actually also have a video on Qurat on the channel. Then another tool that I should be using more often, but I'm not really is time shift. This is a tool that automatically schedules backups of certain parts of your system. So if something goes wrong, you can just roll back. Usually people do it I think uh weekly something like this or maybe daily I don't know and then you can basically roll back whenever you mess up your system which I have done a couple of times I didn't have anything to roll back to so probably I should start using it more often and I think I also have a video on time shift on this channel then another piece of software which I'm also not really using that much is Veraracrypt I used to use it for certain journaling stuff when I was typing something that I wanted to keep private I don't know I kept it in Veraracrypt nowadays I'm keeping in Obsidian with encryption. So, I don't really use it that much. Then, a tool that I used to use, I'm not using it anymore because it doesn't really work on Wayand, at least not without fixing something, is GPIC. I'm not going to run it now because it doesn't work as I said, but basically GPIC allows me to have a cursor which I can hover over a color like this one for example, and gives me the color code. So, if it works for you, it's actually quite a nice tool, but I don't want to set it up right now. Also, a tool that I should be using is copy Q. I don't have it right now. Also, I think because I probably have to configure something. Um, also an alternative here would be G-paste. I don't have it on my system. Basically, for managing multiple clipboards, if you copy something and then copy something else, you don't want to lose everything necessarily. So, you can keep a history of all your copies and all your clipboards and you can then paste from earlier in the day. Yeah. And I think then I only have the gaming stuff left, which is Steam. I'm mainly playing Counter Strike and maybe one or two other games. I'm not really playing a lot, but mainly Counter Strike or I also have Minecraft to be precise. I'm using the Prism Launcher right now. Uh switched to it recently. It's just a very modular auto updating tool. Very nice. I'm also using Mango Hut. I think I cannot really show it here. Mango Hut is basically this thing that you can use to display FPS and so on. And also I'm using game mode. I'm not sure what the command was. Game mode on, game mode up, something like this. I'm not sure. I have it in my Steam launcher settings. And basically it optimizes performance. Oh yeah, and of course I have Obsidian. I forgot to mention that which is basically my commonplace book. I have everything here. My goals, my thoughts, my journals, uh book notes, any business notes, any strategies, any ideas, any university notes, all of this is here structured. Probably I'm censoring out some stuff here because I don't want to show everything publicly, but this is essentially my management tool number one. Occasionally I also use notion but mainly for business purposes. Yeah, maybe one thing that I forgot in the very beginning, this is an essential Linux tool, is hypershot. To do screenshots, I do control and print. And then I get this. I don't know if you see this right now when I'm recording, but I can just make a screenshot and then it tells me here screenshot saved. So, I think that's it. If I forgot anything important, you will find it in a pinned comment down below. I covered the tools very quickly here today. If you are interested in more details in longer videos about specific categories, for example, Arch Linux stuff or Hyperland related stuff or Neoim, let me know in the comment section down below. Also, a couple more things for the channel. If you like this video, let me know by hitting a like button and subscribing. If you're interested in one-on-one tutoring or if you're interested in any services related to what I cover on this channel, you can go to my website to the services or tutoring page. And of course, don't forget to subscribe to this channel and hit the notification bell to not miss a single future video for free. Other than that, thank you much for watching. See you in the next video and bye.