Dotfiles Project | For beginners to learn about system configuration
Tags: dotfiles, configuration, learninglinux
Published: 2019-04-28 01:42:35

---
title: "Dotfiles Project | For beginners to learn about system configuration"
author: "Sam Erickson"
published: true
tags: dotfiles, configuration, learning-linux
description: "A blog post about the start of my dot files project, how to configure swaywm"
---
When I first started in Linux, I was obsessed with dot files configuration. Yet, I spent most of my time fumbling around and having no idea what I was doing, copying and pasting snippets of code from various dot files around the internet. Which is not a bad way to learn, but I firmly believe in not adding anything
to your configuration files that you do now **fully** understand the function and purpose of. Doing so just makes your files cluttered and messy with things you will probably never use.

That Is why I have started this project. I reset all of my dot files and started my system from scratch. The idea here was to rebuild my system to use [wayland](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Wayland),
rather than [x11](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xorg), the reason being x11 was creating all sorts of display errors such as tearing. In other words, I was frustrated every time I would try to watch
Netflix as it looked like my computer way broken, even though it was not. The solution was [swaywm](https://swaywm.org/).

## Moving away from X11
The obvious choice was to stop using the software that was causing me so many issues, but there is a catch. There are very few resources on `swaywm` and that means in order to learn how to create a system that is setup to my liking I was going to need to read lots of man pages, and fumble around figuring things out for myself. 

The biggest issue is that nothing from `x11` works in `wayland`. So the first step was figuring out which apps I was going to switch over to, and how to get them tuned to my liking. 

* Web browser: Firefox already supports wayland so no issues there
* Terminal emulator: For this I use [kitty](https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty)
	, as it supports images (I ran into issues tying to use `w3m`).
* Image viewer: For this I started using [imv](https://github.com/eXeC64/imv).
* Video player: [mpv](https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv) appears to work just fine.
* Screen casting: [green-recorder](http://tipsonubuntu.com/2017/07/03/green-recorder-screen-recorder-wayland-support/)
	This works fairly well, though I have not tested it all that much.
* Screen shots: I am still working this one out
* App launcher: I am using [rofi](https://github.com/davatorium/rofi), though I have not worked on
	configuring it at all.

I started with the goal of only adding software as I needed it so as to slowly build everything up properly.

## The dotfiles project
While copying and pasting other peoples code, and struggling to solve your own issues by reading through threads online, and various blog posts is a great way to learn. I thought there had to be a better way. I could not manage to find very many resources on `swaywm` so I decided to take things into my own hands and start writing a guide. Once I got under way, I thought why not make it a dot files guide? After all, I am sure there are other out there just like me who want to learn how to configure a system but do not know where to start, thus the birth of [the dotfiles project](https://github.com/samerickson/dotfiles).

In this project the current goal is to work on my personal system adding things as I need them in my day to day life, and document solutions to issues that arise in the project wiki. I realize that dot files are more a personal thing, as not everyone will make use of things that I make use of, but this will serve as a place to start for some people who are looking to get into this sort of thing, but find themselves 
overwhelmed on where to start. 

This post was originally posted on my blog at [samerickson.me](https://samerickson.me)