Making things comfy

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I like making things comfy for myself, mostly because it’s an excuse to tinker. This post is full of assumptions because it is mostly for me to remember how to do these things, since I always and inevitably forget exactly wtf I did. If you have questions, feel free to ask me on fedi or elsewhere (available on my about page).

Single SDDM login form

Having two login forms when sddm starts always bothered me, so I finally did something about it. It was much easier than I had expected, which is a nice surprise.

All that is required is xrandr. Find what monitor you want to turn off during login and then add something like: xrandr --output HDMI-A-1 --off to /usr/share/sddm/scripts/Xsetup. Done!

Trying to keep $HOME clean

I do a mix of things to keep garbage dotfiles out of my homedir, usually by setting $HOME just for tha partifular application. For example, moving mupdf’s .mupdf.history to ~/.cache/mupdf.history was as relatively simple:

echo '#!/bin/sh\nHOME=$HOME/.cache /usr/bin/mupdf'; doas chmod +x /usr/local/bin/mupdf

If done right, you should have a file that contains:

$ cat /usr/local/bin/mupdf
#!/bin/sh
HOME=$HOME/.cache /usr/bin/mupdf

Another thing I did was move steam from my home entirely. Editing the steam.desktop, I changed: Exec=/usr/bin/steam %U to Exec=HOME=/games /usr/bin/steam %U.

On my machine, /games is a separate drive that handles basically all my game locations:

$ ls -gGh /games
total 20K
drwxr-xr-x  7 4.0K Feb  9 09:55 dwarf-fortress
drwxr-xr-x  7 4.0K Feb 18 16:51 itch
drwxr-xr-x  4 4.0K Apr  6 18:44 liblast
drwxr-xr-x 16 4.0K Feb 26 06:45 multimc
lrwxrwxrwx  1   37 Feb  9 09:30 steam -> /games/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/
drwxr-xr-x  5 4.0K Feb 19 18:35 veloren

Prefixing a new $HOME for unruly programs has kept my actual homedir far tider than it would be.