Latest posts

Living on the edge: truncating the path on your PS1

Published: March 10, 2026

TL;DR

I didn’t like how the default zsh prompt truncation works. My solution, used in my own custom-made prompt (fully supported by promptinit), uses a custom precmd hook to dynamically determine the terminal’s available width.

Instead of blind chopping, my custom logic ensures human-readable truncation by following simple rules: it always preserves the home directory (∼) and the current directory name, only removing or shortening non-critical segments in the middle to keep the PS1 clean, contextual, and perfectly single-line. This is done via a so-called “Zig-Zag” pattern or string splitting on certain delimiters.

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Question: How can I prevent multiple logins via lightDM

Published: February 9, 2026

Answer

I use xscreensaver and to forbid it:

! in .Xresources
xscreensaver.splash: false
! Set to nothing makes user switching not possible
*.newLoginCommand:

Lightdm supports .d directories, by default they aren’t created on Debian but upstream copy documents them clearly. In other words: /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d/ is read.

Which means you need to drop a file, /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d/10-local-overrides.conf and add the content:

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zsh: Dynamically ignore files for autocomplete

Published: March 5, 2026

This is a small article about a pattern I’ve made to automatically ignore filenames for autocompletion.

In the zshell you can use CORRECT_IGNORE_FILE to ignore files for spelling corrections (or autocorrect for commands). While handy, it is somewhat limited as it is global and perhaps somewhat limited. Now, I wanted to ignore it only for git and not other commands. But I haven’t found a way to only target git without having to make a wrapper around git (which I don’t want to do).

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