ekkie-de

ekkie-de is my attempt at making a fully featured DE using the i3 window manager. It's designed to be installed with Arch's makepkg or an AUR helper. That way, I (and possibly others), don't have to worry about manually installing dependencies or manually configuring every part of my desktop.

Features

• XSession file, to make ekkie-de compatible with most Display Managers
• Automatically sets up gnome-keyring (including SSH agent!)
• Automatically starts...
  • dunst (Notifications)
  • picom (Compositor)
  • gnome-polkit (Prettier privilege escalation)
  • ibus (Better keyboard layout management)
  • udiskie (Managing removable devices)
• Supports XDG Autostart using dex
• Supports config overwrites
• Alacritty as default terminal
• maim for screenshots
• rofi for application launching

Installation

If you're running arch, installation is quite simple. Clone the repository, build and install with makepkg:

git clone https://git.ekkie.cyou/ekkie/ekkie-de
cd ekkie-de
makepkg -si

If you're not running arch, make sure you install the dependencies listed in the PKGBUILD file. Then source the PKGBUILD file in your root-shell (make sure your shell supports arrays, like bash or zsh), and run the package function.

# After installing dependencies...
sudo bash
. ./PKGBUILD
package
exit

Configuration

ekkie-de ships its own, custom configuration for the most integral pieces of software under /etc/ekkie-de/. These include:

• i3
• i3status
• picom
• dunst

You can overwrite these configs on a per-user basis by putting your own config files into $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/ekkie-de/, usually ~/.config/ekkie-de/. Note that ekkie-de only checks on startup whether config files exist under $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/ekkie-de/, so you'll have to restart your session if you added any configs.

Additionally, you can put a symlink under $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/ekkie-de/wallpaper pointing to an image and the ekkie-de script will set it as your wallpaper on startup.

Similarly, you can use arandr to create a display-layout shell script and save it under $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/ekkie-de/screenlayout.sh, which will automatically get executed by ekkie-de.