→ Omakub ∞

Posted on in terminal, omakub

Yesterday, I came across this new script released by Basecamp.

The one-line pitch is:

Turn a fresh Ubuntu installation into a fully-configured, beautiful, and modern web development system by running a single command.

This was started by DHH, but now has a lot of contributors.

Since I’m not on Ubuntu, I can’t directly use it. But I’m tempted to set up Ubuntu on a spare (?) machine just to try this out.

Since this is how DHH wanted his machine to be setup, it installs apps like Zoom and Signal etc among others.

But as the intro post says :

the heart of the pre-configuration lies in the terminal

Since I also spend a lot of time in the terminal on macOS, it was something I could try. Luckily, most of the tools are available for macOS too.

I really liked tokyo-night everywhere.

Here is what I have done so far.

  1. Switched to Alacritty from Wezterm
  2. Configured Alacritty and Zellij 1 based on omakub config
  3. Installed flameshot. Earlier, I used to use Zappy for annotating screenshots (To be shared with bug report or a fix.)
  4. Installed eza replacement for ls I had tried exa - before eza was forked out of it since exa was unmaintained, and for some reason, forgot to install it when I reinstalled macOS recently.
  5. Made same font as omakub my default for Alacritty

Things I did not install:

  1. mise : I already use asdf, so I don’t see much use switching. mise also has task runner functionality, but I use just in place of make, so I’m good.
  2. Neovim 2 : Happy with Emacs and Helix. Thank you very much. Update
  3. Lazygit : I tried to use it. But I couldn’t learnt the keybindings and felt like I can’t use it. For now, I’m happy with magit when in Emacs, and just plain ol’ terminal when writing in Helix
  4. lazydocker seems interesting. I might try it when I need to interact with docker a lot
  5. Typora: Since I use Helix for markdown (like these posts), I skipped that section of the demo video. omakub also installs VScode (which I already have) which can very easily be used for markdown, why an editor just for markdown ? It might make sense for DHH - who I assume writes lot more text than me.

Overall, this exploration was much fun.

  1. Since I was already using Zellij, this was nothing more than theme change. ↩︎

  2. It is not like I’ve not spent enough time configuring neovim “just right” 😄 ↩︎