Ivan Fraixedes' Blog

Arch Linux essential tweaks and applications

Posted on Jun 27, 2025

This post is part of a series of posts about installing and configuring Arch Linux in a Slimbook Executive 14". I created them from a collection of personal notes, that I thought may be useful for others, so I published them through these series.

  1. Base Arch Linux installation
  2. Arch Linux network configuration
  3. Tracking dotfiles
  4. Arch Linux essential tweaks & applications

This post and the next are related to personalize my recently installed Arch Linux. Although in the previous one, I already made some choices, they are not as personalized as the ones to come.

Tweaking sudoers

I wanted my user to be able to power off, reboot, etc, using sudo but without having to type a password.

To grant my user to do so, I created a new sudoers file /etc/sudoers.d/10-common-operations-no-passwd with the following content:

ivan blacksmoke= NOPASSWD: /ur/bin/systemctl halt,/ur/bin/systemctl hibernate,/ur/bin/systemctl poweroff,/ur/bin/systemctl reboot,/ur/bin/systemctl suspend

And I ensured that only root can access to it

# chown root:root /etc/sudoers.d/10-common-operations-no-passwd
# chmod -c 0660 /etc/sudoers.d/10-common-operations-no-passwd

Sync the clock

I wanted to sync the computer clock, so I enable the systemd-timesyncd daemon with

# timedatectl set-ntp true

My default shell

I wanted to use the fish shell, so I installed and set it as a default shell for my user

# pacman -S fish
# chsh -s /usr/bin/fish

Changing my default editor

If you have read the base Arch Linux installation post, I installed NeoVim, but I never set it as my default editor.

As a convention applications that requires to open an editor should read the EDITOR environment variable.

The /etc/environment file is a file that contains the environment variables thar are exported for all the sessions are created.

I created the file because it didn’t exist and I added

EDITOR=/usr/bin/nvim

Comfortable using the terminal without a desktop

When you don’t have a desktop environment (at least at this point, I didn’t have any), tmux is one of those tools that will be your friend, why? Because between many things, the two most important features for me is that I can have tabs and multiple panes (vertical and horizontal), so I convert a single terminal session in a full fledge environment where I can have several applications running at the same time and move from to another as I do in a desktop environment.

Nowadays, there are similar terminal emulator that may be for some people a better choice, however, this isn’t a debate if Tmux is the best, the worse, or the average. I use tmux because I used for long time, remotely and locally, and it works good for me, so I haven’t invested my time on learning another one.

So, yes, tmux is what I wanted

# pacman -S tmux

A few essential tools

The last missing tools at this point were

  • man because I need to read documentation
  • less because I need to paginate outputs
  • extfat-utils because I need to mount external ExtFat disks
  • bat because syntax coloring to cat certain files is helpful in certain situations
  • vimfm because is used for certain applications to show file differences

so they were in with

# pacman -S man-db extfat-utils less bat vifm

Welcome Arch User Repository

Some good tools aren’t in the official Arch linux official package repository, but they are in AUR (Arch User Repository), the package repository manage by the community.

You cannot install AUR packages with pacman, buy you can do it manually which isn’t that bad, but it’s a bit tedious due to the process boilerplate and you have also to repeat it manually to update each installation that you installed from AUR. Fortunately, there are tools that simplify the process and make our busy life easier.

There are many tools to install AUR packages. I chose to install Paru, however, I don’t have a strong argument for it, which is I liked what I read and it’s implemented in Rust.

Let’s install it.

Paru

First we have to make sure that we have installed and up to date the basic tools to build Arch Linux Pacakges (a.k.a. base-devel)

# sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel

Paru is in the AUR packages, so we have to install it manually. After it, we shouldn’t recur very often or even never to manually install and update AUR packages, because that’s what it will do.

# cd .local/makepgk/sources
# git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/paru.git
# cd paru
# makepkg -sirc

makepkg will ask for installing Rust via the rust or rustup, I chose rust, rustup didn’t work because it couldn’t select which Rust version to use.

Anyway, the dependency will be deleted after the installation, that’s what the -r flag does in the makepkg.

After the installation, I also deleted .cargo and .rustup directories that were created in my home directory.

Finally, I wanted to apply its general tips at the time that I installed.

To apply them and other recommended options:

  • I enabled the pacman’s Color uncommenting it from /etc/pacman.conf.
  • In /etc/paru.conf, I enabled the file manager viewer to use vifm uncommenting FileManager option and making sure that it’s set to vifm (i.e. FileManager = vifm). Remember to uncomment the [bin] section if it’s commented because this options belongs to that section.
  • In /etc/paru.conf, I enabled the search results to start at the bottom and go upwards, uncommenting the option BottomUp. Remember to uncomment the [options] section if it’s commented because this options belongs to that section.

And that was all for the day.