Blog: ekkie-de

content/blog/ekkie-de.md

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+---
+title: DIY Desktop Environment
+draft: false
+publishdate: 2023-04-29T19:51:15+02:00
+---
+
+I have a pretty severe case of DE-Hopper-itis, and I blame my
+younger self discovering i3 for that. Ever since then, I again and
+again get fed up with having to configure everything myself in WMs
+like i3 (or even dwm a few years back), I switch to a DE like xfce
+or gnome so things "just work", I miss the workflow of a tiling
+window manager, repeat.
+
+I've tried to fix that by stuffing all of my configs into a
+dotfiles repo, but that wasn't enough. I wanted to automatically
+install dependencies and configs. So, this time, I've decided to
+write my own Arch PKGBUILD package. I have no plans to upload it to
+the AUR or port it to any other package managers, as it's a very
+simple package and I don't expect anyone else to use it.
+
+It's available [on my gitea][ekkie-de] (not tildegit, as I felt
+that it has nothing to do with the tildeverse). It includes an
+xsessions .desktop file, a few config files, and, most importantly,
+a startup script (think, like, startxfce4).
+
+[ekkie-de]: https://git.ekkie.cyou/ekkie/ekkie-de
+
+# Startup script
+
+This is probably the most important part. You need a good startup
+script in order for window managers like i3 to interface nicely
+with Display Managers. The very first thing ekkie-de's startup
+script does is setup gnome-keyring. Not because it's the best
+keyring, but because it's... the best SSH-Agent, at least for X11.
+
+Unlike OpenSSH's ssh-agent, gnome-keyring automatically adds all
+SSH-Keys it can find that also have a public key in ~/.ssh.
+However, it doesn't decrypt them, which means you don't need to
+type in all of your SSH-Key passphrases at login. When you then try
+to SSH to some server, the gnome-keyring will present all public
+keys it knows, and will only ask you to decrypt a fitting SSH-Key
+if it hasn't already been decrypted this session.
+
+Apart from that, the startup script will choose which config file
+to use for a few of ekkie-de's apps: If
+`$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/ekkie-db/configfile` exist, that one will be
+used. If it doesn't, `/etc/ekkie-db/configfile` will be used as
+fallback. That allows me to ship default configs that I like, while
+still allowing further per-user configuration.