Writing on software development.

All of my long-form thoughts on programming, and a few on music and drumming.

Parsing Bash Config Files

Many times a script is written that needs extra/persistent configuration from the user. In most languages this is no big deal, you just import your json/yaml/toml parser and you're good to go. The common thing to do for many bash scripts that require configuration is to ask the user to put another actual bash script containing variable declarations in the file:

4 min read, 716 words

Killing the Display Manager

Display managers like LightDM and SDDM come standard with many Linux distros, and I personally find them useless. I'd like to share with you how to get rid of them and gain a bit of control over how X is launched, and take back a few precious megabytes of RAM.

7 min read, 1377 words

Vim beginner's customization guide

This article is for those who've been using Vim for a little while and have started to grasp modal editing and the powers of Vim, and now want to start customizing it. If you're completely new to Vim, I have another post describing some of the basic of learning Vim [here](/computers/vim-guide) but there are dozens of them on the internet, and Vim ships with `vimtutor` as well which is a great place to start.

26 min read, 5172 words

Backporting packages in Debian

Are you anxious for a new version of a particular package, and don't want to wait for someone else to submit it to backports? After a few hours of reading docs and testing this out myself I feel like I've gotten a good grasp on this, so I'd like to share what's been working for me.

5 min read, 831 words