My Ansible Role for Nerd Fonts

Installing Nerd Fonts is easy in Arch Linux: they are in the official repositories. That’s not true for Ubuntu and Fedora. Of course, installing them in these distributions is also not complicated. Still, it is a manual procedure: download the font archive, extract it in a specific directory, and regenerate the font cache. That sounds […]

Java, Maven and Gitpod, part 5: the Formatter

This is the 5th post about using Java in Gitpod. It assumes you have already read the first, second, third, and fourth posts. We can benefit from automatic formatting. First, select (from F1) the command “View: Toggle Render Whitespaces”. We can see that the Maven archetype generated Java source code with spaces for indentation: I prefer […]

Automatically regenerating Neovim spell files

In Neovim, when you add a new word to your spellchecking dictionary with the command “zg”, the word will be added to a “.add” file in your config directory in the subdirectory “spell”. For example, “spell/en.utf-8.add”, depending on your locale. That’s a textual file you might want to share among different machines, e.g., part of […]

Ansible tasks for installing Firefox and Thunderbird as DEB packages in Ubuntu

Ubuntu has forced the installation of Firefox and Thunderbird as snap packages for some time. I don’t like snap packages since they’re a bit slower to start, take much more space on the disk, and store the profile files into the “.snap” directory folder, while I want them in the standard place in my home […]

macOS 12: bye bye homebrew

If you use the Homebrew package manager in macOS and you have macOS 12 because your Mac is too old to update to a new version of macOS, you can say goodbye to Homebrew: if you try to update your brew packages, you get such a message:

If you continue with the update or […]

Neovim and Java with LazyVim, part 2: IDE mechanisms

This is the second part of a few tutorials on Java development with Neovim using the LazyVim setup. This post assumes you already read and applied all the steps of the first part. You need Java installed (possibly 21), while Maven is optional. I will use this Maven example during the tutorial: https://github.com/LorenzoBettini/maven-bank-example, part of […]

Sway in Arch Linux: other configurations

Let’s continue the Sway window manager (in Arch Linux) series I started in my previous post and continued in the other post. Screenshots We can use “grimshot”, part of sway-contrib, to take screenshots, which requires the main program for performing the actual screenshot, “grim”.

By default, such utilities are installed in “/usr/share/sway-contrib”, which is […]

Neovim and Java with LazyVim, part 1: initial configuration

Updated 16 December 2024 (for Telescope) This is the first part of a few tutorials on Java development with Neovim using the LazyVim setup. I highly recommend LazyVim because it has many cool plugins configured with nice defaults. Moreover, as we see in this tutorial, it lets you quickly have the Java LSP up and […]

Sway WM: Notifications with Mako

Let’s continue the Sway window manager (in Arch Linux) series I started in my previous post. In this post, we deal with system notifications. (This post is similar to the corresponding one about Hyprland.) We use mako, a lightweight notification daemon for Wayland, one of the optional software suggested when we installed Sway. We also […]

Speeding up AUR package installations in Arch Linux

This post can be used for Arch Linux and EndeavourOS. Recently, a change was committed that highly compresses AUR packages before the actual installation. This takes a lot of time: even on a fast machine, installing something like Chrome or Visual Studio (AUR packages) takes even minutes just for the compression phase. Since I typically […]

Hyprland EndeavourOS on a PineBook Pro

After installing EndeavourOS on a PineBook Pro, I tried to use Hyprland on this PineBook Pro. Since I have already blogged about Hyprland a lot, I want to report that Hyprland runs smoothly on this PineBook Pro. I basically reused all my ricing and customizations that I blogged about in my previous posts about Hyprland. […]

Sway in Arch Linux: getting started

I’m starting a new blog series about Sway, a Wayland Tiling Window Manager (the Wayland version of i3). Though I’ve already blogged about Sway, this post (and a few future ones) are intended as “getting started tutorials”. I’ll focus on Sway in Arch, in particular, EndeavourOS. Let’s start by installing EndeavourOS with no graphical environment […]

How I manage Neovim configuration with Chezmoi

I love to manage my dotfiles with Chezmoi, which I highly recommend! In a single Git repository, I have common dotfiles and Window Manager specific (KDE, GNOME, Hyprland, and Sway). However, I prefer to have my Neovim configuration in another Git repository, separate from my Chezmoi dotfiles. I’ve just started learning Neovim, and I’m not […]

Installing EndeavourOS ARM on a PineBook Pro (August 2024)

I have already blogged about installing EndeavourOS ARM on a PineBook Pro (and previously, directly Arch ARM: the first article and the second article). This blog post will describe the new procedure for installing EndeavourOS ARM on a PineBook Pro. As usual, the instructions can be found here: https://endeavouros.com/endeavouros-arm-install/. Previously, there used to be three possible […]