Getting comfortable in Ubuntu for software development —30 October 2016
Getting comfortable in Ubuntu 14 LTS is not exactly trivial.
Privacy first
Disable the annoying and horrible online search in Dash:
- Open System Settings
- Go to Security & Privacy
- Go to Search tab
- Switch off online search
The keyboard
The Caps Lock key is perfectly useless. The Control key is extremely useful. In previous versions there used to be an easy way to make Caps Lock an additional Control. That seems to be gone now. This command will do it:
setxkbmap -option caps:ctrl_modifier
To make it permanent,
add it to ~/.xsessionrc.
(No need to make it executable.)
In case the GUI freezes (sadly it does happen), it’s good to be able to shoot down the X server easily with control alt backspace, like it used to be the default in the good old days:
setxkbmap -option terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp
Making Caps Lock an additional Control in virtual terminals is a bit harder.
Dump the current keymap and make a backup:
dumpkeys > keys.kmap
cp keys.kmap backup.kmap
Edit the keymap file, replace CtrlL_Lock with Control on this line:
keycode 58 = CtrlL_Lock
Compress it and copy to the default location:
gzip -9 keys.kmap
sudo cp keys.kmap.gz /etc/console-setup/cached.kmap.gz
I pieced this together from this more detailed article: http://superuser.com/questions/290115/how-to-change-console-keymap-in-linux
Sound
The startup sound can be annoying. An easy way to disable that is to rename the sound files:
sudo mv /usr/share/sounds/ubuntu/stereo/desktop-login.ogg{,bak}
sudo mv /usr/share/sounds/ubuntu/stereo/system-ready.ogg{,bak}
Install “essential software”
apt-get install git vim-gnome jq screen pwgen
Configure “essential software”
ssh-keygen -t rsa -C user@host
mkdir -p dev/git/github
cd dev/git/github
git clone https://github.com/janosgyerik/dotfiles
#./dotfiles/install.sh # TODO ;-)
git clone https://github.com/janosgyerik/shellscripts
./shellscripts/install.sh
Firefox
Install the Greasemonkey and JSONView extensions.