⟨m∀⟩

Intro

In the latest weeks of the year, I have made up my mind about two major projects that I want to undertake.

After a few months of Omarchy, I have decided to create my own Arch starting kit. Omarchy was always a means to an end: to try Hyprland. But it did more than that and rekindled my curiosity to explore the vast universe of Linux desktop. At the same time, I feel like Omarchy is heading a way I won’t enjoy; so it’s time for me to starch anew.

I have also decided to revamp my Emacs init. This is easier to explain so instead of a summary, let’s dive in directly.

New Emacs init

I started using Emacs in 2008. I found ReST to be the best text format I could use for all my academic writings [1], and Emacs had (and still has) the best support for editing ReST. It was really easy to add lists, headers, and most of the ReST features I regularly used. With emacsclient I managed to insert citations directly from external tools.

In 2010 I did the switch completely and started using Emacs as my programming environment. I was primarily using Ruby and Rails. I started with basic Ruby major mode and step by step I started to use more of Emacs features to make my way around the code base. I started using dired, rgrep and lots of others. I learnt to use TAGS, but never managed to integrate them with Ruby.

In 2011 I left my academic job and (re)started to program in Python. I started collaborating with a former teacher of mine, who was also using Emacs. Together (mostly him rather than me) we built an Emacs setup (xorns) which is the one I have been using since. This setup has accumulated a lot of stuff over the years; it is already 8000+ lines of elisp.

Recently, I started to wonder how much of it do I still need. Emacs has changed a lot in the past releases, and xorns has not taken advantage of most of them.

That is why I created my .emacs.lite.d and started working on it. So far, I have already reached 344 lines of elisp. I guess it will keep growing as I use this new configuration.

However, the guiding principle is that I want to keep my .emacs.lite.d as small as possible. Most should come from Emacs itself or a 3rd party. What I don’t find in a 3rd party and cannot possibly contribute, I will add. Otherwise, I’ll stick to the basics so long as they don’t hinder my productivity.

The biggest change so far is moving from lsp-mode to eglot. There’s nothing wrong with lsp-mode, in fact I miss some of its features. But since eglot was included in Emacs I wanted to give it a try. This is it.

From Omarchy to Starch

It’s a starch not a distro.

Building your own Linux desktop is a time-consuming effort. Building and maintaining a Linux distribution is beyond what I can afford now. Therefore, leaving Omarchy was not an easy decision. Nevertheless, in the latest updates Omarchy has made some choices that have worsened my personal satisfaction of it.

The following list is not meant to be complete, or even demonstrative of the issues. These are simply the latest annoyances:

• They removed the screen capture without audio. That is the only kind of screen record that I do. I don’t stream; I don’t record and edit videos for educational purposes or other. I don’t even have a mic besides the integrated one in my laptop. I only need to record my screen to either show something is broken, or fixed.

  After I record my screen I also had to use ffmpeg to remove the audio stream.

• They removed the Suspend menu option because it didn’t work reliably.

  It worked for me, and at least three other users felt the need to report it.

  My solution this time was to copy omarchy-menu in my ~/.local/bin/; modify to add this back, and also fix the screen capture issue.

• I use Emacs; not nvim. When installing Emacs in Omarchy, they cleverly make it a user unit in systemd. But then omarchy-launch-editor doesn’t connect to the already running Emacs instance. I submitted the fix a month ago. Since they haven’t merged it yet I have now my own ~/.local/bin/omarchy-launch-editor.

• …

It feels like I’m slowly cloning every Omarchy script into my home [2]. If that is the case, I will have to manually patch those scripts after updating Omarchy; and the update itself can become risky if my changes to some scripts are incompatible with theirs.

I’d rather not wait till my system becomes inoperative and start developing my own set of scripts without the illusion of a Linux distro.

Footnotes

[1]	ReST didn’t have all the features I needed, but with a simple script I could transform it to LaTeX + BibTeX.

[2]	I have copied or replaced more scripts than the two mentioned. They are still just a few compared to the 142 scripts shipped with Omarchy; but they represent a trend.

[3]	This is rather a list of wishes than a real plan. But it is enough for this side project.

[4]

This logo was mostly AI generated. I can credit myself for the shape of the A. Despite my repeated instructions to hint the shape of the Arch logo ChatGPT 5.2 could not manage to produce something decent. So I took the best one it gave and dusted off GIMP to shape the A. Then I asked ChatGPT to produce a SVG, and it did the best it could; the edges of the letters had dents and imperfections; but I liked this for my rough and imperfect project. So I only improved the shape of the A to have a smoother (yet off center) arch, and overall less defects than the other letters.