Some Linux tools and commands I use

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Some of the apps, scripts or tools I use are set and forget, or just work without me ever needing to touch them after initial configuration. Then by the time I need to make some changes or reinstall my system, I forgot what the names of these tools are or how to configure them and I need to research everything all over again. That’s why I decided to keep this list, for myself to refer to whenever I need a reminder.

This list is (very) incomplete, constantly evolving and as everything on this site mainly meant for my personal use.

My main OS is Manjaro Sway.

As clipboard manager I use CopyQ.
It needed some extra config to make it integrate into Sway the way I like.

I also use a text expander: Espanso. I’ still manually restarting it from time to time with the command line “espanso restart”…

I also have Warpd installed to replace mouse, but always forget to use it…

To make my hotkeys react differently to short press and long press I use interception – dual function keys and configure it in /etc/interception/my-mappings.yaml

Grimshot for screenshots

rofi-wayland as menu, with rofi-power-menu, rofi-mixer, rofi-calc

waybar as system bar

For video editing I use Shotcut, and for screen recording OBS Studio.

The shell command “kbdrate -r 9 -d 500” may or may not solve the irritating debounce issue on my Bluetooth keyboard.

To turn on battery conservationI use TLPUI or on ideapad laptop (charge only to 60%):

sudo bash -c "echo 1 >/sys/bus/platform/drivers/ideapad_acpi/VPC2004:00/conservation_mode"

And to turn it off echo 0 instead of 1.

sudo bash -c "echo 0 >/sys/bus/platform/drivers/ideapad_acpi/VPC2004:00/conservation_mode"

On my other thinkpad I found that running the following command after setting desired valued in tlpui did the trick as well

sudo tlp setcharge

Bettercap for some network debugging and monitoring

Switching from Sublime to VSCodium as text editor

LMStudio and GPT4All as my local large language modal, with mixtrial dolphin as model.

Ventoy to make a bootable disk than supports multiple iso in 1 drive

fwupd to update firmware:

fwupdmgr get-devices
fwupdmgr refresh
fwupdmgr get-updates
fwupdmgr update

To turn off the LED on the i of a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 (thank you vali20 on /r/thinkpad)

sudo modprobe -r ec_sys
sudo modprobe ec_sys write_support=1
echo -n -e "\x0a" | sudo dd of="/sys/kernel/debug/ec/ec0/io" bs=1 seek=12 count=1 conv=notrunc 2> /dev/null

//enable
# echo -n -e "\x8a" | sudo dd of="/sys/kernel/debug/ec/ec0/io" bs=1 seek=12 count=1 conv=notrunc 2> /dev/null
# blink
#echo -n -e "\xca" | sudo dd of="/sys/kernel/debug/ec/ec0/io" bs=1 seek=12 count=1 conv=notrunc 2> /dev/null

Later I found that this works for me as well, without sudo, so I can run it from my sway config file with exec.

echo 0 > /sys/class/leds/tpacpi::lid_logo_dot/brightness

and for the power button led

echo 0 > /sys/class/leds/tpacpi::power/brightness

But even running it on startup (via the sway config file), the lights turn back on after waking from sleep, so I added this to /lib/systemd/system-sleep

#!/bin/sh
echo 0 > /sys/class/leds/tpacpi::lid_logo_dot/brightness
echo 0 > /sys/class/leds/tpacpi::power/brightness

and I did add this kernel parameter in grub, not sure if it made a difference:

 ec_sys.write_support=1

The external keyboard KU-1255 (Lenovo ThinkPad Compact USB Keyboard with TrackPoint) FnLk key doesn’t work, and by default it returns Fn instead of function keys. While the Fn+Esc key doesn’t work, you can switch it like this:

echo 0 | sudo tee  /sys/bus/hid/devices/*17EF\:604*/fn_lock

When writing the Sway config file it’s sometimes handy to know a window name or app_id. The easiest way to get those is with

swaymsg -t get_tree

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