What Are Linux Users Putting In Their Config Files?

today I'm gonna make a video about a reddit post that I saw earlier today so I was over at our slash Linux and I came across this post quote I've crawled duck files on github and I want to share some statistics basically what this guy did is he crawled github for some common dot files that many of us have such as a bash or C of VMRC X and yet our see things like that and he wanted to see what the most common settings people used in their dot files were and I thought well that's really really fascinating he actually posted the full report to his own github repository and I will of course link to the report in the show description but today I wanted to go over some of this information because I thought it was fascinating because it really gives you a glimpse about what other people are doing it shows a little bit of the commonalities especially amongst a lot of our dot files so let's start with the bash aliases what do you think are the most common bash aliases well when you think about it what are the most common commands that you use in the shell think about it you're constantly seeing changing directories and you're constantly running an LS to list the contents of the directory you're in those are probably the most common shell commands you run so it goes without saying that you're probably aliasing CD and LS a lot especially LS because LS has a ton of flags and those flags are quite useful a lot of people are aliasing la for lists all you know because by default LS does not spit out the dot files you know the hidden files and directories it doesn't list those unless you give it a a flag and that's what people are aliases a - it's actually LS space - capital a meaning all the files and directories including the hidden ones except I don't want the dot or the dot dot those are not included if you use the capital 8 flag if you used a lower case a flag it would include the dot and the dot dot as well and you can see there's a few other LS aliases that people love to use a common when a very common one is aliasing LS to actually be LS space - - color equals Auto Oh same thing with grip you see grip - - color equals Auto is just adding a little color to these commands another common alias we mentioned sitting around in your directories is common a lot of people alias dot dot - actually equal CD space dot dot which is you know CD into the parent directory instead of having to do CD space just want to do dot dot and it goes there now that's a really cool alias the dot dot alias I actually use that myself another option that you could do is you can run the command SH opt space - s space Auto CD put that in your bash RC and what this does it enables Auto seeding which means I don't have to type CD if I just type the path it's CDs right I don't have to prepend it with a CD and the same thing with dot dot u if I just type dot dot now it just automatically sends me to the parent directory I don't have to actually put CD in front of it so that is another option you guys should be aware of but actually it looks like most people don't know how to alias dot dot or to enable the auto CD functionality looks like most people are just content with CD everywhere which to be honest is kind of what I do too I just I'm used to typing CD so I don't mind not having the auto CD enabled it looks like some people are also aliasing some git commands you see alias GS equals get status I can understand that it saves you on typing if you're constantly running a git status some other common aliases people use are the move command and the remove command and these are dangerous commands because you can move something and actually overwrite another file that's dangerous and obviously remove as a dangerous command because you can remove a file that you really didn't mean to so by adding the - I Flags to move and remove it is a interactive flag is what the I stands for basically it requires your confirmation before you actually delete or overwrite a file one thing I should mention is this very very long and convoluted alias here one of the most popular aliases from the survey this guy what the heck is this well it's a notify send alias just know that this is part of the default of moon to bash RC a lot of people run a boon - let's move on to exports so what are people exporting in their bash RC well surprisingly VM is very popular okay actually that's not surprising VM is a fantastic text editor so a lot of people are setting their editor in their bash RC and you can see them it's the one most people it looks like are using according to this survey by the way the survey he didn't survey a ton of different repositories a few hundred because you know he has to crawl github he's since the spider out to crawl get up and github probably doesn't like that he's doing that anyway so it's not exactly scientific is this I can't say that you know them is the most popular editor according to everybody's bash RC but at least in the dot files this guy surveyed them is very popular some other interesting exports here you see the second one in DM directory that's interesting that is so popular in V M stands for node version manager I'm not a programmer or a developer by trade I'm don't know anything about no js' or anything like that but I do know that sometimes you have to have multiple versions of it on the system and this helps with that nvm is the node version manager the third most popular export is the path a lot of people if you're new to Linux and new to the shell are confused exactly what path is path is the location of a file and there are two types of paths there's the absolute path and there's the relative path the absolute path is the full path name so my home directory is slash home slash DT that's the full path to my home directory now if I was already in my home directory and I wanted to go to my downloads directory now the path to my downloads directory the relative path is just downloads but the absolute path would be slash home slash DT / downloads so it's something to remember well when you run programs in linux those programs are all files on your file system and technically you would have to type the full path to those files for example if I ran a LS and my terminal the actual full path to LS is slash user slash bin slash LS nobody wants to type full paths to programs that you run all the time so what you do is you set paths to where binaries are on your system nor the programs that you run on a regular basis are on your system that way you only ever have to type the program name you don't have to type the full path to them so that is what the path is all about in your your shell looks like I some people are also exporting CLI color that's command line interface color a lot of people are setting their terminal in their bash RC it looks like the most popular setting is X term - 256 color I think that's also what I have set in my bash RC most of the rest of its standard stuff a lot of people are setting English us UTF for the locale exporting visual to vim again more language stuff English us and then the last one is interesting exporting history control to ignore both and what does this mean well by default in your bash shell when you run the history command it lists your history every command you've run like the last 500 or last thousand whatever it is you set it to well a lot of people run the same commands over and over and over again how many times do you just type cd' or just type LS in the show probably hundreds of times right and you want each of those in similar entries to be in your history no well if you add this line to your bash RC where hist control equals ignore both basically it removes the duplicates any command that begins with a space and any command that's a duplicate of another command that's already in your history it ignores those the next thing to look at as far as your bash RC is people's ps1 now that is your prompt so you have several prompts in your shield you have ps1 ps2 ps3 ps4 the one that is the most important one is PS one you rarely ever use those other prompts PS one it looks like for most people if they're gonna take the time to actually configure it they do user name and then the @ symbol at the host name and then the directory there in the working directory and then of course the dollar symbol to let us know that the prompt to you know we're a standard user now that would be a pound symbol if you were the root user that seems to be the most common prompt and I I agree it's like the standard prompt right user at host the directory you're in and the dollar symbol if people are not using that one and the second most common PS one prompt people are using it's just a dollar sign they don't want user hos working directory you can always PWD print working directory to find the directory you're in if you're confused about it but yeah that's a very nice minimal prompt right just the dollar sign that's a little too minimal for me and then there's some other listings here but none of them are very common so I won't bother with the risk now the other prompts ps2 ps3 ps4 they are not common prompts at all you rarely ever see them so most people don't even take the time to configure them so there's really well nothing to see with that ps2 by the way is if I opened a terminal right now I guess I could actually show you what the ps2 is for those of you confused about it let me open up a terminal and I'll zoom in so let me login to bash - so this is the bash shell so this is my ps1 write the standard prompt here now what ps2 is is if you have a multi-line command the next prompt you see is the ps2 prompt so if I did a yes and let's do terminal so if my terminal equals and I believe in my bash RC I have my terminal set to St - 256 color and then I hit enter you know this if statement is not completed right so it's a multi-line command you see the next prompt is actually just that a right pointing Chevron the greater than sign that's the ps2 you could change that if you wanted to I never bother I don't know too many people that actually care what that prop looks like but you could change it if you wanted to I'm not gonna bother continuing the if statement there but you see what that ps2 prompt is for those of you that might have been wondering about that and for sake of completeness we should talk about ps3 and ps4 ps3 is the prompt you see when the Select command is waiting for input if you run select in the shield a ps4 is used for debugging it's not a very common prompt to you probably won't ever see it continuing on through the dot file survey here red line macros I'm pretty sure he must build that that should be read line macros what is a read line macro these are basically shell macros they run commands that are built into the bash shell so let me switch over to my desktop once again and open a terminal and then let me zoom in here I'm gonna switch over to bash and let me show you exactly what a macro is here in the shell for example I know if I hit escape because I have VI mode in my shell I have to get into it a normal mode by hitting escape once I'm in normal mode I know I have a macro control P for previous goes back through my shells history goes to the previous commands and my shells history control n would go forward through the shell history let me clear the screen there there are a ton of shell commands that you might already have set macros to by default some of them are already set for you but there are a million commands in the best yield that don't have a macro set they're not actually active you may want to set them anyway that's what all of this is I'm not going to discuss these particular reline macros that were listed there if you actually wanted to see all of the macros that are available to you in the bath shell you could just type the word bind space - capital P and it will actually give you a list of all the macros and it will actually tell you you know these are not bound to any key so as this one's not actually active and it will tell you some of them can be found on and it will give you the macros that are actually set for it let me kill the terminal moving on through his list here the next thing this guy surveyed was BS pwm dot files and he was surveying basically what window rules people sit with BSP see there's a particular command within BS PWM called BS PC and he was finding what the most common settings for that is now actually this I don't find any of this particularly interesting basically all this is doing for the most part it looks like most of these are deciding where their particular programs should be in a telling layout or a floating layout for example the last one here calculator yeah typically if I open a calculator I don't want it to be tiled in my tiling window managers I want it to be floating at the right size that a calculator should look now same thing with especially if you have the multi window layouts in like the toolbars and everything or their own separate windows you don't want that stuff tiling right I want all of that in floating mode the next interesting thing about BSP WM is he surveyed what people set their window gaps and border width to and it appears if the second of the two numbers is the border width two pixels as a common border that's same standard it seems like when I see people's dot files 2 pixel borders are very common and tiling window managers it's actually what I use essentially what I'm using right now I mean cue tile today but all these windows have a 2 pixel border width and 2 pixels is small but it's big enough you can see it if you use a bright enough you know a color with enough contrast from your default background yeah yeah you can see the active window just fine I think 2 pixels is perfect for a tiling window manager border with what kind of scares me though is how many people are using gigantic window gaps 12 pixels was by far the most common a 12 pixel gap between your windows think about how much wasted screen real estate that is I mean to be honest if you're really worried about screen real estate and being as efficient as possible you probably are not using gaps at all and a lot of people are you say a lot of zeroes here there's a few people that sit zero who for the gaps and that's really probably what you want if visually you need a little bit of gaps between windows for pixels is just enough it's not very big but it's just enough that you can see some separation between your windows I would never go more than about eight pixels wide I see people sitting twelve that's big fifteen that's a gigantic gap between windows and I see especially screenshots of people using 2025 pixel gaps and that's just ridiculous no I get it but if you're doing screenshots if you're putting something on our slash unit exploring the gaps look good but for you know just working on your computer again it's just a lot of wasted space the next thing on the survey were the fish dot files so people that use the fish he'll what or are they aliasing so we already checked out the bash aliases the fish aliases are very similar I won't spend a ton of time once again them is very popular neo film is very popular so obviously people are aliasing those things LS again it's very popular a lot of people are aliasing LS 2e x 8 exa is not a standard shell program you actually have to install it but it is a nice replacement to LS it's actually my LS people often ask me about my LS when I run LS and I get you know that that really cool output you know that is actually exa close that terminal yeah exa is fantastic and it's you it has a ton of settings like you can really configure it to your heart's content and it's it's a nice little upgrade to LS and it adds you know a little bling to the terminal the other really common fish alias is involved kit so a lot of people are aliasing G to get GS to get status GD to get diff I scroll down let's see what people are exporting in their fish files here it looks like again we're setting our editors to the Omani opium we're setting our terminals looks like a alacrity is very popular among people that use the fish hill the alacrity really seems to be gaining and popular I know when I made my video about alacrity you know about a month ago that video got a ton of use I know a lot of you guys are trying out at Lac rity it's just fantastic it really is the best terminal emulator I think I've ever used it probably looks the best it's the easiest to config it has a ton of configuration options you don't really have to jump through a ton of hoops with alacrity the way you do configuring things like X term you are xvt st one other thing to note in the fish exports it looks like a lot of people that use the fish he'll also use in and in as their file manager that's a terminal-based file manager in onion now scrolling down we get into some really interesting stuff so those of you that use vim or in this case niobium because that's what he's surveying here you know what are people sitting in their EMR C or they're at net BM so it looks like most VM and naôve M users are probably sitting sit expand tip but most are also sitting number what is that well expand tab what that does is it inserts spaces in places of tabs inside them that's very important you really don't want tabs really you want tabs to actually just be spaces and typically you said it stabs equals four spaces is typically what most people go with setting number is adding number lines in them I think most people actually want line numbers in them so that's a very common setting set hidden it's the third most common sitting now what this does is you know opening a new file when you're inside a current buffer you know and it has unsaved changes sometimes it causes that a hidden file to be closed you know a but but if you sit it to be hidden that follow you were working on just doesn't disappear it doesn't vanish it's just hidden temporarily some of the other set statements here just briefly ignore case ignores case sensitive searching so basically case insensitive searching is what that turns on setting background equals dark is just sitting a theme settings shift with two fours that's again and when you hit shift it's four spaces setting a smart case so this is interesting smart case so when you use ignore case and smart case together basically went up your have a search pattern you're searching for if that pattern contains an uppercase litter it will be a case sensitive search but if it's all lowercase it's a case insensitive search if that makes sense so it's a really kind of cool feature setting your mouse equals a basically that allows you to do some copying with VM as far as copying and pasting text outside of them into them you know you need that setting setting no backup them by default will backup files it'll create these backup files all over your system setting no backup prevents that setting tab stop - for again setting tabs - for spaces what are the most popular color schemes in film or neo film well by far the most popular color scheme by far growth box that's interesting because you know it's a popular color scheme I see a lot of people out there using it in screenshots I think it's hideous I really do I think that is just an awful color scheme I've never liked that you know in the years I've been in Linux I have never actually tried to use grip box because I just think it it looks bad I think there are much nicer color schemes out there a matter of fact the next four color schemes that are listed Dracula one dark Nord and Moloch I have used all four of those and those are very sexy color schemes well one of the ones that's not listed or it's very low solarized I am actually surprised that solarized is not much higher in this list because I think it probably should be a solarized dark also is I it's not even in the list that's very strange to me what about them plugins are neova plugins a lot of people use the bundle plugin manager in them and in neo film and those of you that are using bundle what are the most common plugins you're using well looks like most people that use bundle are using bundle of course that's the most popular nerd tree which is a file manager like plug-in that you can use with VM it basically just adds a little bling to your VM it's not actually not that useful to be honest there are a couple of get plugins people use VM fugitive and VM gutter a lot of people like airline airline as a power line effect to European VMD vikon's is this adds little icons beside the entries in nerd tree so again it's more for aesthetics it actually doesn't do anything the productivity was let's see what else do we have them indent line so basically that displays a thin vertical line at each indention level hope that makes sense it's not something I typically turn on but when I see other people's films screenshots I see a lot of people using that particular plugin the last plug-in I really don't know anything about tabular I think it just lines text up into columns I'm pretty sure that's what that does I'd never personally used that plugin other than fundal it looks like he surveyed people that use a vim plug which is another plug-in manager it's the same plugins that are popular for the most part I see a fuzzy finder is in the list for vim plug it wasn't in the list for bundle fuzzy finder is a very popular plugin moving on SX HKD the simple X hotkey daemon so he surveyed BS PWM users everyb s pwm user is also using SX HKD most of this information I'm going to tell you that the key bindings they're not very interesting as standard b SP c key bindings nothing to see here but the commands that don't involve b SP c they actually are interesting because what programs do people typically keybinding well firefox is very popular not surprising right firefox is the free and open source browser right it's a big company it's a major player in the free and open source movement so it's not surprising that the kind of people that typically would run bs pwm are probably all in on free and open source software and they probably use firefox rather than any of the chromium based browsers just based on principle other popular programs that people keep bind and SX HKD are player CTL player control multimedia controls private command-line utility so this would be to control things like Spotify DLC audacious things like that through NAR appears to be the most popular file manager with the BSP WM crowd that's not surprising there gnar is a very fine file manager I prefer PC man FM for my file manager the most popular terminals are termite and alacrity pretty much the same in popularity and I like both terminals termite is very good at lack rity while I already mentioned I think alacrity is probably the best terminal emulator going right now and it looks like equally as popular daemon you and Rho fee are equally as popular so that's actually surprising I would think for the kind of people that would run something like BS PWM the more minimal suck less kind of crowd I would think daemon you would be by far the most common run command launcher but equally as popular is Rho fee that's surprising that wouldn't be surprising if we were talking about other window managers but again with the BS PWM kind of crowd I would have thought daemon you would you know be twice as popular as Rho fee at least let's look at what people are sitting in there termite config so termites a terminal emulator the most common settings are of course font settings what is the most common terminal font mono space by far that is crazy because mono space is just the standard system font guys are you not installing other fonts and setting other fonts and your terminal emulators that is weird I mean that just blows my mind I see heck is a pretty popular fun it's listed here four times hack is in the standard arch repositories so it kind of makes sense that hack is popular with this crowd the only the only other font other than mono space and heck is source code bro that's the only one that made the survey alright and then the next section is film now he already had a section on neo of Young configs the vim configs and the surveys with VM are basically the same it's not worth going over again it was basically what we saw with neo VM let's get down to X org so let's see what window managers people are using if so this would be surveying people's X and NRC you know things like that the files what window manager are you launching when start X is is and basically I three is very popular that's not surprising I three has been kind of the mean window manager for a few years now I threes not been around terribly long time but it's been very popular the last few years here recently and I've been telling you guys I'm seeing a ton of people a ton of people post screenshots of BS PWM and do articles on BS PWM and do videos on BS b WM BS PWM is the new meme it's really probably gonna overtake a popularity soon you know these things you know they they come in cycles you know before I 3 came into existence awesome window manager was the most popular window manager then I three you know now it's BS PWM and it'll be something else you know in a couple of more years but BS PWM really seems to be the latest meme dwm was very popular with this survey that's shocking like you know like wow really but again the kind of people that probably are using the X and it RC and posting dot files they're the more minimal crowd probably there the more suck list crowd and if you like you know that kind of suck list philosophy yeah then it makes sense probably most of those people would gravitate to something like DWM and something like BS pwm so I think that explains why those are popular typically if you use an X in it RC you're not using a login manager you're probably installed a really minimal distribution like arch or Gen 2 and you're using star X to launch a single window manager yeah those kinds of people I can see how BS PWM and DWM would be very popular amongst that crowd and really nothing else on the list is very popular I mean way down in popularity would be awesome X monad open box Emacs plasma and s o WM now plasma and open box are far more popular then everything else on this list but the reason they're so low is again the survey I mean it's looking at the X in it or C if you're running plasma you're not using the X in it RC right you're using the login manager SD DM and same thing with open box most people that run open box open box is part of a full desktop environment LXDE or LX queued or something and you're using a login manager or even if you're using open box by itself stand-alone open box you probably installed it with you know a pre-configured distribution like arco or arch labs or bunsen labs or crunchbang plus plus which all come with login managers they're not using the exit yet are see so this is not this list here in no way tells you anything about window manager popularity because again that file that particular file the X in it our CFO is used by a small subset of Linux users what kind of demons are running in people's XNA Darcys Dunst the notification daemon Dunst makes sense right everybody likes notifications sx HKD that's a very popular daemon again with this particular crowd that's not surprising exit route - cursor name this is setting the the cursor because by default I think the X cursor is an actual X and obviously you want to change that number lock of course num lock X unclutter now unclutter is interesting so basically that hides your mouse cursor when you don't need it is what that particular daemon does in um applet that's your network manager hi calm and Compton are basically the same thing as a compositor PI comm is a fork of Compton competence no longer developed so they forked it and create it by com that's the compositor that gives you transparency and drop shadowing and prevent screen tearing and all that and your standalone window managers and then 50h that set your wallpaper and that's the entire survey that this guy did I know that was rather lengthy to talk through but I I found that post just fascinating I don't know I hope you guys found that fascinating about what people are using what people are setting and their various dot files I hate that it is such a small survey again he just surveyed a few hundred different dot files but even just the small survey yeah I thought you know it was interesting and just talking through what each of these settings you know for those of you that are not familiar with what some of the settings with various the bash RC commands and the VMRC commands just talking through them I know some of you guys are probably interested and what some of those settings are and you may add them your duck Falls now before I go the show was produced by Michael Mitchell Chris DJ Donny Dylan George Kaplan Nate Lee request honoree Rob Sean and Willie these guys are the producers of the show these guys are my highest tiered patrons over on patreon the show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen these names are saying on the screen these are all my supporters over on patreon because this channel is supported by you guys the community you'd like to support the channel consider doing so you'll find distro tube over on patreon alright guys peace you

Channel: DistroTube

Views: 59,278

Rating: 4.9548874 out of 5

Keywords: linux tutorial, linux, gnu linux, configuration files, config files, dotfiles, github, gitlab, bashrc, vimrc, xinitrc, bash settings, vim plugins, bspwm config, sxhkd config, linux configs, shell config, bash aliases, fish aliases, vim settings, linux dotfiles

Id: P7Jd0iNSCQA

Length: 31min 47sec (1907 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 10 2020