alpymist

Software

Terminal and shell

The terminal

Super+Return opens foot, a small, fast terminal.

Key Does
Super+C / V Copy and paste, as everywhere
Ctrl+Shift+C / V The terminal's own copy and paste
Shift+PgUp / PgDn Scroll back
Ctrl++ / - Larger and smaller text

Its font and behaviour are in ~/.config/foot/foot.ini (Setup › Config › Terminal); its colours follow Settings › Appearance. Another terminal installed from the Store can be made the default in Settings › Default applications.

The shell

The shell is zsh, with:

  • Suggestions from your history as you type, in grey: → accepts one.
  • Syntax highlighting: a command that does not exist is red before you press Enter.
  • Completion on Tab for commands, options and files. After alpymist it knows the settings and what each takes: alpymist set touchpad. and Tab lists the touchpad's, and Tab after one of them lists its values. bash and fish, installed from the Store, are given the same.
  • oh-my-zsh's git plugin, which gives short names such as gst for git status and gco for git checkout.
  • The starship prompt, showing who and where you are, the directory, the git branch and its state, the language a project is written in, and the time.

Your ~/.zshrc is yours (Setup › Config › Shell), and the prompt is in ~/.config/starship.toml (Setup › Config › Prompt). All of it is installed and updated as packages; oh-my-zsh's own updater is turned off.

What is installed

For Tools
Version control git, gh
Networks ssh, curl, rsync
Editing nano in a terminal, squint on the desktop
Reading less, man
Files unzip

man git works: the manuals of these tools are installed with them.

There are also a few programs that fill a terminal's window:

For Program
A git repository lazygit
Music and internet radio cliamp; R lists the stations
What the machine is doing btop
What fills the disk ncdu
Several terminals in one, that outlive it tmux
What the machine is fastfetch

They come with the desktop, as the package alpymist-tui. All but fastfetch are among the menu's applications too, each opening in a terminal of its own: ncdu there starts in your home directory, and tmux comes back to the session it left.

cliamp's own cliamp upgrade is not how it is updated here: it comes with the system's updates, like everything else.

Editors

squint is the desktop's text editor: it is what the menu's Config entries open, and what VISUAL names for programs that ask for an editor. It opens files of any size at once. In a terminal outside the desktop, such as over SSH, the editor is nano.

To use another editor everywhere, install it and set VISUAL in your ~/.config/hypr/hyprland.conf, in place of the line that names squint:

env = VISUAL,code --wait

Running something as administrator

doas apk add btop

doas is Alpine's sudo. It asks for your own password.

Edit this chapter on GitHub