Linux

Useful commands

Description	Command
Restart gnome shell	ALT + F2, then r
Force kill process	kill -9 PID
Switch virtual console	CTRL + ALT + F1
Install deb	dpkg -i DEB_FILE
Regex replace	echo ... \| sed 's/IN_REX/OUT_REX/'

Hints on makefile

# Create a local variable in a rule
rule1:
  $(eval VAR := $(shell YOUR_COMMAND))
  echo $(VAR)

# Apply rule to all tex files
RES_DIR = pdf
SOURCES = $(shell ls *.tex)
OBJECTS = $(addprefix $(RES_DIR)/,$(SOURCES:%.tex=%.pdf))
ci: $(OBJECTS)
$(RES_DIR)/%.pdf: %.tex
  ...

Description	Command
Variable local to target	$(eval year := $(shell YOUR_COMMAND))

Useful packages

In the following sections some packages I find quite useful

Zsh

zsh is an alternative to the bash terminal, it has a powerful autocompletion engine. It can be installed trough sudo apt-get install zsh and can be set as default terminal with chsh -s $(which zsh). I have experienced some troubles with this command and a small hack to solve this problem is to run the following line of code.

echo -e "\nexport SHELL=\"/usr/bin/zsh\"" >> $HOME/.profile

File with a custom version to be sourced in .zshrc is here

Set keybindings for history search

autoload -U history-search-end
zle -N history-beginning-search-backward-end history-search-end
zle -N history-beginning-search-forward-end history-search-end
bindkey "^[[5~" history-beginning-search-backward-end
bindkey "^[[6~" history-beginning-search-forward-end

To get the keycode associated to a key, enter the command cat in a terminal end then type the wanted key

Copyq

Copy/paste is a feature daily used on computers. The copyq package allows to keep in memory the list of all the copied texts so that you can paste them in a second moment. It can be installed through sudo apt-get install copyq. This package can be launched at boot by adding the command copyq --start-server in the list of startup applications.

Pandoc

Latex is a standard package to render professional and readable pdf files. It is sometime the case that setting up all the configuration for a latex environment is not so practical. An alternative to this is to use the pandoc package which allows to convert markdown files into pdf using the latex engine. Pandoc is also capable to convert md files into html.

To render html files, I usually run:

pandoc --toc --number-sections -s --embed-resources --standalone  \
  inFile                                                          \
  --mathjax=path2/tex-chtml-full.js                               \
  --include-in-header=path2/header.html                           \
  --lua-filter=path2/luaFile.lua

where

1. inFile is the markdown file to be rendered in html
2. tex-chtml-full.js is the js file allowing to render mathjax in html
3. header.html contains some html code to be added in the header of the rendered html
4. luaFile.lua is a lua file allowing to preprocess the markdown file before the html rendering is done

The list of options passed to the pandoc command produces a standalone html document with toc and where the sections are numbered

Miscellaneous

• Opam is the package manager used for ocaml projects. The following post gives more details about how you can deal with it, see here
• python-is-python3 allowing to call python is the terminal instead of python3
• VSCode on of the most used IDE worldwide (the package name is code)
• pygments is a python extension to compile minted code of tex files

Install the previous packages

In a new computer, I usually run the following list of command to install the packages/scripts mentioned above. I also initialize opam

sudo apt-get install \
  code zsh python-is-python3 \
  opam copyq texlive-latex-extra python3-pip &&
wget \
  "https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/releases/download/3.1.9/pandoc-3.1.9-1-amd64.deb" \
  "https://fissored.github.io/MyHelp/zip/battery_health"
  "https://fissored.github.io/MyHelp/zip/opam_switch_coq_elpi.txt" &&
mv ./battery_health /home/$USER \
pip install pygments \
sudo dpkg -i pandoc-3.1.9-1-amd64.deb

battery_alert is documented here

Miscellaneous

Set local time:

echo -e "\nexport LC_TIME=\"en_IE.utf8\"" >> $HOME/.profile

en_IE.utf8 is for English, Ireland