Comment by nextos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nextos | Hacker News Reader

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I think the Arch Way really shines if you stick to small applications that do one thing and do it well. This is the essence of Unix.

There are periodic surveys among Arch users, and it's pretty interesting to see a majority of them sticks to this ethos:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1_LisP8224B2yahtZTYB-pnIt0aP...

Such a choice would be considered hardcore in some more mainstream distros. I began transitioning to this setup more than 5 years ago and I couldn't be happier. A simple system configured in a few text files is very rewarding:

* xmonad+dmenu (no login manager, other tiling WMs like dwm or i3 are worth considering)

---

* zsh

* urxvt (completely keyboard-driven with https://github.com/muennich/urxvt-perls)

* emacs (nox version)

* remind (a great DSL for events https://www.roaringpenguin.com/products/remind)

---

* firefox+vimperator

* mutt+isync+notmuch (fast Gmail-like index and address book)

* zathura

* irssi (consider switching to https://github.com/WhisperSystems when implemented for CLI Linux)

---

* git

* rsync+btrfs-progs (incremental time stamped backups)

* openssh+sshfs

* gnupg

---

* powertop+thermald

* connman

---

* arch-init-scripts (for systemd lightweight containers, all my development happens there)

* texlive

Out of curiosity:

How's connman working for you? Do you have a GUI for it, or just CLI?

Does isync support IDLE? offlineimap has quite a few bugs and I can't wait to change it (I've a very similar mutt+offlineimap+notmuch+opensmtpd setup).

Connman is fantastic. Mind that it is used by Android and Jolla. I'm very happy with it. Super fast and robust, miles ahead wicd, networkmanager or netctl.

I use it from the CLI, but there are some QT GUIs around.

Isymc doesn't support IDLE, but its fast enough to be able to run it every 2 o 3 min. Ask in the mailing list thou, they had some discussions about implementing it.

Check mutt-kz too, soon it will replace mutt+notmuch.

I was aware of Jolla using it (I've a Jolla phone), but didn't know about android. That adds some pretty important backing to it.

I don't generally dislike cli, but using I've never felt comfortable using it for networking. I like the popup notifications when I get disconnected, and the very visual menus, for some reason. I'll try to give it a try though.

> Check mutt-kz too, soon it will replace mutt+notmuch.

FWIW, mutt-kz has pretty good notmuch support. At least as much as I've needed.

That's a really nice survey. Thanks for sharing!

Why emacs and then vimperator? And why not pentadactyl?

I prefer emacs for editing text, but modal vim-like interfaces for simple tasks such as browsing a document (zathura) or the web (vimperator).

I switched back and forth between vimperator and pentadactyl many times. Pentadactyl is a bit more complex, and used to break often. Perhaps it is no longer the case?

I haven't seen pentadactyl break anything in a long time, but then I run a very vanilla setup. I'm the current maintainer of pentadactyl-git on AUR; if you try it and have trouble you can always ask in the AUR comments.

Sounds great, I'll give it a try again very soon.

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