Dotfile Tweaking is my Version of Scrolling Shorts

2026-08-19

I’ve realised that tweaking my dotfiles/writing new scripts is basically my form of doom-scrolling/scrolling shorts. I’ll be trying to do something, and I notice something about my setup that could be improved, or I think a script could be useful in the current situation. I’ll then inevitably spend the next 5-20 minutes scripting/changing dotfiles rather than actually doing what I was supposed to.

I do have a file system-admin.md which I am supposed to write all these improvements/ideas in, so I can set aside some time to do it, but I don’t really use it.

Here is everything currently in that file:

• Theme sxiv (dark theme)
• Backup system (I need a better backup system, not just do a backup)
• Setup dwm
  • Keybinds
  • Bar
  • Scratchpad
  • Desktop workspace
  • Conky setup
• Switch to Alpine Linux
  • Performance testing on secondary drive
  • Main install
  • Package list
  • Update otherPrograms.sh
  • Download better malloc implementation
• Set up https cloning for my git server
• Set up a Monero wallet (just for fun, don’t expect to get any money really

and here is the list of stuff I did in the last 2 days:

• Split apt-install.sh up into categories so it’s nicely organised
• Find font package (fonts-noto-core) that has weird fonts that some YouTubers use in their channel names
• Make an alias to mocp that defaults to XDG_CONFIG_HOME
• Write/re-write a script to allow searching wikis (Wikipedia, Terraria wiki etc) in dmenu
• Added a bunch of comments to my scripts to explain the format of config files
• Improvement to queue-vid.sh so it’s not sending notifications when being invoked manually
• Spend an hour working on a conversion script to take a windows cursor theme and make it into an X11 cursor theme

I need to start actually using system-admin.md. I’ve added it to my morning.sh script so I will see the contents of it when I run that, and I’m tracking it in my status.sh script which shows outstanding stuff I have to do (left over bookmarks in Firefox, extra stuff in ~/Downloads, number of todos in bug.sh etc)