Teches on ZachIR's Human Den

How to Use ZIRLESS

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 19:15:39 -0500

ZachIR’s LARBS Equivalent Setup Scripts

I forked Luke Smith’s LARBS to setup stuff in a way that is more automatic for me. A few notable extensions are:

support for using Arch, or Artix with its init systems
setting up permissions for doas or sudo
adding Arch repos to Artix automatically
install init system scripts in addition for service (S) packages
installing “packages” from git repos, via make and sudo make install
installing packages via PKGBUILDS from a git repo
installing my dotfiles repo to ~/.config by default, instead of ~

I also include my own progs.csv, which sets up my standard Hyprland desktop; however, it is also backwards compatible with Luke Smith’s progs.csv or any other LARBS compatible progs.csv.

I Might Check Out Scroll Instead

Mon, 28 Jul 2025 16:21:20 -0500

So, update: I will probably end up checking out Scroll instead of Niri. Scroll is a fork of Sway, with a scrolling layout and a Lua API. I was originally only interested because of the former, but over my little bit of investigation the latter has been extremely helpful.

For example: I wanted scratchpads to work the way I’m used to. In Sway (and i3, and Scroll) there is a single scratchpad, that windows can be sent to and pulled out of. What I’m used to is the dwm scratchpads patch, where you can have basically however many you want, with one window per scratchpad.

More Thoughts on Niri

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 21:48:23 -0500

So, it turns out Niri does not have scratchpads yet.

In my experience, that has been the sticking point for many an X11 tiling window manager, and even more so for wayland compositors. I have ~12 scratchpads for programs I want to use and put away at a moment’s notice, without having to close and re-open them. Stuff like htop, ncmpcpp, neomutt, irssi, profanity, easyeffects. Managing those programs in this way has become an integral part of my workflow, so while I’m sure I could make Niri work for me, it’s definitely a strong point for Hyprland. I just have to hope that hyprscrolling will continue to improve, and will get to a fully usable point.

I Might Check Out Niri

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 09:40:39 -0500

I love tiling WM’s. This is nothing new; as far as my Linux journey, I’ve been using a tiling window manager for longer than I haven’t been. And I’ve used a lot, some highlights being:

dwm
xmonad
qtile
awesome
bspwm
herbstluftwm
river
sway
Hyprland

There are a couple of noticeable trends on this list. Firstly, I tend to prefer dynamic tilers to manual. But second, I’ve only ever used traditional tiling (as opposed to scrolling). Frankly, I wasn’t aware of scrolling window managers as a thing until Brodie’s videos on Niri.

Hyprland

Mon, 21 Jul 2025 20:31:23 -0500

So, I’ve been on Hyprland for quite a while. Basically, since Brodie Robertson’s first video on it. I have to say, Hyprland single-handedly made Wayland usable for me. Not that I’m strictly opposed to using X; I am one of (what I believe to be) the silent majority of Linux users who says use whatever you want to. Don’t use a display server at all; that’d be pretty cool, too.

Portal 2: A (Very) Long-Term Review (Part I)

Fri, 16 Feb 2024 19:47:12 -0600

BREAKING NEWS: I’m back

That’s right, after a very long (even for me!) absence, I have crawled out of my hole in the wall to write about something rather important to me. This is part I, where I will be broadly going over the game before I go into specific parts.

BACKGROUND

I have been a libre software advocate for many years now, but there has always been one big exception for me, and it’s the same one as most almost-libre users: gaming. I have a Steam account, and a GOG account, and I purchase and run proprietary games, even if they have DRM.

Learning a Programming Language

Sat, 23 Jul 2022 23:12:09 -0500

I decided I wanted to learn a programming language. I was originally intending to learn something more similar to the ones I already know (C/C++, Rust, Python, Lua), but instead it was voted on Lunduke’s Locals that I should learn Scheme. I know a little bit of history about it; it is a Lisp dialect, which means (lots (of (parens))), which I am not a fan of. I know that Scheme was originally going to be the web scripting language, but companies wanted something that looked more like Java, so Brendan Eich invented Javascript (the bane of my existence). But I haven’t really tried to learn Scheme specifically, so we’ll see how it goes.

OS List

Thu, 21 Jul 2022 16:58:52 -0500

Here is the list of operating systems I want to try out, in no particular order:

GhostBSD
QubesOS

Writing Blog Posts In Markdown

Tue, 24 Aug 2021 00:00:00 -0500

Writing Blog Posts In Markdown

I have found a new method for writing my blog posts, which I will be giving a shot today (and hopefully keep, as I just migrated my local copy of my website to it), where I have every page written in R Markdown, with a template.html file, which I use as the template for pandoc to compile everything into html. Additionally, the template.html file loads my main.css stylesheet, which means that I can have a separate stylesheet, and have it loaded for every page; additionally, every page has the same header and footer; as well, I don’t need much fanciness within the content of each blog post, so Markdown is a perfectly viable language to write them in.

Why Artix?

Wed, 18 Aug 2021 00:00:00 -0500

Why Artix?

I may have mentioned this before, but I am an Artix Linux user by default (except when I am an OpenBSD user). I have tried many other Linux distributions (Fedora, Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Arch, Antergos (RIP), Endeavour, Manjaro, MX, OpenSUSE, Debian, Devuan, a couple of LFS based distros, NuTyX and Venom). I think it's fair to call me a Linux power-user. No, I haven't ever gone down the CentOS (RIP), or Mandriva (RIP) based distros, but I am pretty comfortable with Linux systems. And yet, no matter how far I may roam, no matter what I try, I always come back to Artix. What can I say? The repos are excellent, I can go the minimal install route and not have to remove a bunch of crap, and leave unnecessary libraries littering my SSD, I have the entire AUR at my disposal (even though I typically have to write init scripts for the daemons I get from the AUR, like auto-cpufreq), I have the one ok part of systemd (logind) without the rest (I can choose either RUnit, OpenRC, or S6 as init systems).

Initial Thoughts - Gentoo

Sat, 14 Aug 2021 00:00:00 -0500

Some Initial Thoughts While Installing Gentoo

For those of you who don't know, I have been using either Artix Linux, OpenBSD, or a combination of the two, for most (if not nearly all) of the past year. Why? Because I love them, and they work. Well. But sometimes, you get bored with the status quo.

Sometimes, you want to try things the hard way. And if you're me, sometimes you take small benefits in smaller size and resource usage as an excuse to compile your operating system from source.

Terrestrial NeoVim

Mon, 09 Aug 2021 00:00:00 -0500

Terrestrial NeoVim

Well, I scrapped spacevim. It just didn't work out from me; even with the lazy loading, it was still pretty slow to start on my old laptop (although, to its credit, it was still speeding up a little a few days later). What surprises me, though, is that the 436-line, 27-plugin configuration of neovim is still significantly faster. Which, incidentally, is what I have been up to today.

Vim In SPACE

Sat, 07 Aug 2021 00:00:00 -0500

Vim In SPACE! - Trying a Vim Distribution

I have been a *vim-exclusive user since the late 2010's, which (un-)coincidentally was around the time I switched full-time to Linux. Specifically, neovim is my weapon of choice (based purely on a cursory examination of the mission statement and repo).

After finding out about Free software from a Richard Stallman talk (how exactly I got to said talk was a journey inandof itself), which led me to learning about GNU, and specifically GNU Emacs. At that point, I considered myself something of a software minimalist, so I decided Emacs was too bloated for my to try. Then I heard about it again a couple years later, from Distrotube, and I thought about giving it a try. It seemed to run just as quickly as vim on his videos.

Full Metal ALSA

Fri, 06 Aug 2021 00:00:00 -0500

Full Metal ALSA - The Most Minimal Linux Sound Setup

In this post, I am going to tell you how I got "pure ALSA"* working on Artix Linux (I know this will also work on Arch Linux, and assumedly other Arch based distros, for as long as "apulse" and "lib32-apulse" are in the AUR).

*: ALSA is the only operational sound server on the system; however, as some applications require Pulseaudio, the command 'apulse' is used as a translation layer, so the applications think they are using pulseaudio, and ALSA behaves in a more friendly way, but it is still just ALSA.

\[RANT\] Modern Design Sucks, II

Wed, 04 Aug 2021 00:00:00 -0500

"Modern Design" is the Worst Thing to Happen to Websites

The Brave web browser advertises itself as loading web pages "three times faster than Chrome," a claim due very little (if at all) to rendering web pages faster, but rather due largely to blocking large chunks of javascript and ads from loading. The CNN homepage (which is usually the one referenced by Bryan Lunduke) takes a whopping 9.63 MB and almost a minute to download (at least on my crappy American internet). As a point of comparison, my homepage takes up 3.34 KB (according to Librewolf), and Luke Smith's landchad.net homepage takes up 88.4 KB.

\[RANT\] Modern Design Sucks, I

Tue, 03 Aug 2021 00:00:00 -0500

"Modern Design" is the Worst Thing to Happen to UIs

If you've ever found an application, which you enjoyed using for years, before the developers suddenly pulled the rug out from under you and forced you to suffer under the plague of developers "modernizing the UI", where now, instead of a beautiful row of buttons, you now have a single button, affectionately known as the "hamburger menu," in order to add an extra step for everything you need to do, then you have been struck by Modern UI Design.