The side project that made me love shell scripting

samYorel — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

🌍 The problem: your environment, that forgotten essential

You know the drill:
Your laptop dies. Or you have to switch OS for a client project.
What happens? Hours spent reinstalling Git, Node, your IDE, aliases… before writing a single line of code.

It happened to me during a major rush. Worst possible timing. And that’s when it hit me:
Your environment isn’t a detail. It’s your foundation. And I had zero control over mine.

🔥 The trigger: stop suffering, start owning

I don’t code much at work anymore, so when I start a side project, every minute counts.
Losing an hour fixing why brew can’t find wget? Frustrating.
Fighting broken shortcuts because I don’t have my usual layout? Even worse.

So I decided to treat my setup like a product:

focused on user needs (mine),
designed to remove friction,
minimal but reliable.

No magic frameworks, no over-engineering.
Just simple scripts I understand and can trust.

🛠️ My approach: scripts, not a black box

It’s more than just dotfiles.
I built a small toolkit:

✅ Features:

A Makefile to orchestrate everything (make install && make init)
Shell scripts for macOS, Fedora, Ubuntu
A few aliases and editor tweaks

No Chezmoi. No Stow. No Ansible.
Why? Because I didn’t have time to learn, and I prefer knowing what I run (no hate here just "dad life").

📦 Repo: github.com/thomas-leroy/dotfiles

Example:

# Install packages and initialize environment
# Display status, prompt questions when needed
make install && make init

Five minutes later, I’m home.
Far from perfect, but damned satisfying.

✅ The good and the messy

What works:
✔ Familiarity in minutes
✔ Less friction, more focus
✔ Every bug fixed = permanent gain

What sucks:
✖ Maintenance never ends (and that’s okay)
✖ OS quirks are sneaky
✖ Nothing’s ever perfect (and that’s the game)

📚 What I learned

Organization beats automation: clarify before scripting.
Every script is a conscious decision (hello DHH).
Simplicity wins: better to understand than blindly copy-paste an Ansible playbook.

Automation isn’t laziness.
It’s discipline.
It’s investing one hour today to save ten tomorrow.
And come on, it's fun!

🚀 Your turn

Does your environment feel like yours, or are you just putting up with it?
Have you ever treated your setup like a product?
How do you balance quick fixes versus long-term ROI?

👉 github.com/thomas-leroy/dotfiles
It’s raw, imperfect, but real.
Steal ideas, roast my approach, or share your worst setup nightmare.

🎭 Final confession

I know that in two years, I’ll probably throw this all away and rewrite everything using some fancy new tools.
But for now… I’m happy with it.

Emberstone: Why I built my own dark theme (and what I learned along the way)

samYorel — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 09:43:27 +0000

🕳️ It all started with a rabbit hole…

One evening, I fell into r/unixporn. You know the kind of community where your terminal looks like a Blade Runner set and every screenshot is a mood board.
I scrolled, I liked, and then I thought: “Why doesn’t my setup feel like that?”

I loved dark themes. But most of them felt too cold, more like a corporate hacker aesthetic than a place I’d want to spend hours in.
I wanted warmth, something cozy yet professional.
That’s how Emberstone was born.

🔥 The idea behind Emberstone

Mood: dark, yes… but inviting.

Goal: readable, balanced contrast, pleasant for long sessions.

Accessibility: good enough to avoid eye strain and UX nightmares.

The name? Emberstone : the glow of embers in the dark.

🛠️ What I wanted to cover

I didn’t want just a VS Code theme. I wanted an ecosystem:
**
✔ Editors:** VS Code (starting point)
✔ Terminals: Konsole, Hyper, Warp, iTerm2 (coming soon)
✔ Browsers: Firefox
✔ Comms: Slack, Discord (coming soon)
✔ Media: Spotify via Spicetify
✔ Websites (Stylus): ChatGPT, Reddit, Twitter, GitHub, YouTube (WIP)

A theme that doesn’t stop at your IDE but extends across your digital environment.

✅ The good and the… real-world stuff

Upsides:
Visual comfort: coding became a smoother experience.
Consistency: no more palette wars between apps.

Challenges:
Time: building a theme is a rabbit hole of its own.
Bugs: spotting broken styles and not having the time to fix them.

📚 What I’ve learned

Theme design is craft: it’s not “just colors.”
Details matter: one wrong color and your UI feels off.

Massive respect to theme maintainers: every theme you install in 3 clicks hides hours of invisible work.

🚀 What’s next?

Emberstone is a side project. It won’t be perfect (especially solo).
But it already taught me a lot: about dev UX, accessibility, and patience.

It’s open source: Emberstone on GitHub.
Try it. Break it. Improve it. Or just steal ideas, whatever works for you will make me happy.

Forem: samYorel