home/ concepts/ setup
concept Meta

My Setup & Environment

setuptoolsenvironmentlinuxeditor

Machine

  • OS — Arch Linux (btw)
  • Kernel — Linux 6.6 (custom config, stripped down)
  • CPU — Intel Core i7-11th gen @ 3.2GHz
  • RAM — 16GB DDR4
  • Shell — zsh + starship prompt

Editor

  • Neovim — primary editor, lua config from scratch
  • Plugins — lazy.nvim, nvim-lspconfig, clangd for C/C++, treesitter for syntax
  • Theme — custom dark colorscheme matching this site’s palette

Terminal

  • Kitty — GPU-accelerated, ligatures, good color support
  • tmux — persistent sessions, split panes for code + build + GDB side-by-side
  • Font — JetBrains Mono Nerd Font, 13px

Build & Debug

  • GCC / Clang — depending on the project. Clang for better diagnostics.
  • GDB + pwndbg — kernel and userspace debugging
  • QEMU — all kernel experiments run here, GDB stub attached
  • Make — simple Makefiles, no CMake unless forced to
  • Valgrind — memory error detection in userspace projects

Key Tools

  • objdump / readelf / nm — ELF inspection daily
  • strace / ltrace — syscall and library call tracing
  • perf — CPU profiling, cache miss analysis
  • gdb — obviously
  • htop / btop — system monitoring
  • ripgrep (rg) — faster grep, used everywhere

Workflow

Most sessions follow this pattern:

tmux new-session
  ├── pane 1: nvim (code)
  ├── pane 2: make && qemu (build + run)
  └── pane 3: gdb (debug)

For kernel work, QEMU runs with -s -S and GDB connects via :1234. Everything is version-controlled, committed after each working state.

Dotfiles

All config lives in ~/.dotfiles — Neovim, tmux, zsh, kitty, starship. Symlinked via a small shell script.

← back to concepts