Scripts

I made some "useful" POSIX-compliant scripts in ~/.local/bin/. This document will try to demonstrate what each script can do.

Archive List (als) ~

Lists the contents of the specified archive with human-readable file sizes, modification dates, and names:

• -x/--extract; prompts for confirmation, then extracts the archive into the current directory if it contains a single top-level entry, or into a directory named after the archive otherwise.
• -o/--open; opens the archive in a new st window with an interactive extraction prompt, and if it's comic book archive (.cbz, .cbr, .cb7, and .cbt), opens it with zathura.

Backup (backup) ~

Backs up files and directories specified in ~/.local/share/backup-list.txt to a compressed .tar.gz (tarball) archive with everything under a top-level directory, and dumps it to the specified output directory (or the current working directory, if unspecified). See: Backup Guide.

Drive Mounter (mounter) ~

Allows you to mount/unmount drives, including LUKS-encrypted partitions (which it tries to unlock in the terminal, if detected). If no device (/dev/device) is specified, it displays a dmenu prompt listing all available partitions (along with their size, filesystem, label, and mount status) to select and toggle.

It also comes with a --daemon option that runs in the background, monitoring udev events to automatically mount devices when plugged in and clean up directories when removed.

Drives are mounted to directories within /mnt/ (using sudo, so giving permissions to mount/umount/cryptsetup for your user is crucial). Notifications are sent via dunstify to indicate mounting/unmounting success or failure. When eligible non-root drives are available, a new block appears in the status bar (sb-mounter).

Fetch (fetch) ~

Displays system information (including the hostname, hardware, operating system, kernel, installed package count, shell, desktop environment, and uptime). It also uses chafa to display an image alongside the system information when the terminal supports Sixel, is wide enough, and ~/.local/share/fetch.png exists.

Mail/RSS Checker (mail-rss-check) ~

Periodically synchronizes mail accounts using mbsync and refreshes RSS feeds using newsraft every 5 minutes. When aerc is not running, it displays notifications through dunstify for new messages (while newsraft handles notifications for new feed updates itself). It tracks the last synchronization time using ~/.cache/mail-check's modification time, and extracts the sender and subject from each new message. Skips syncing when offline or when GnuPG passphrase is not cached.

Mirrorlist Updater (update-mirrors) ~

Fetches and sorts the latest Pacman mirrorlist for both Artix and Arch repositories (using reflector).

mpd notifications (mpd-notify) ~

Displays mpd playback notifications through dunstify, showing the track title, artist, album, playback state, and cached album artwork when available.

mpv Scripts ~

These aren't shell scripts, but they're a useful handful of Lua scripts in ~/.config/mpv/scripts/ that extend mpv beyond the built-in OSC (alongside the third-party mfpbar and thumbfast scripts, used for the progress bar and on-the-fly thumbnails, respectively).

Crop (crop) ~

Rewritten from crop.lua. Lets you select and apply a crop region on the current video, as a filter. Refuses to start while hardware decoding is active, and syncs the resulting rectangle to user-data so other scripts (trim, thumbfast, and thumbyt) can use it.

Download (download) ~

Downloads the currently playing URL with yt-dlp into ~/Downloads/mpv/, carrying over the active subtitle track and the configured ytdl-format. It also shows dunstify notifications for the download, with the completion notification offering an "Open File" action to play it back.

Menu (menu) ~

Rewritten from mdmenu and mpv-quality-menu. Shows dmenu menus for:

• playlist; selects a playlist entry.
• tracklist; selects/toggles a video, audio, or subtitle track.
• video-quality/audio-quality; selects a specific format from the ones reported by yt-dlp, laid out in aligned columns (resolution, FPS, bitrate, size, codec, etc.), fetching them on demand if not already cached.

Screenshot (subtitles/video) ~

This replaces mpv's default "screenshot" command (with or without subtitles burned in), with the only difference being copying to the clipboard.

SponsorBlock (sponsorblock) ~

Rewritten from mpv_sponsorblock_minimal. Automatically skips segments (sponsor plugs by default, configurable) in YouTube videos, preferring embedded [SponsorBlock] chapters when present and otherwise querying the SponsorBlock API. sponsorblock toggles skipping on and off for the current file.

YouTube Thumbnails (thumbyt) ~

Rewritten from thumbyt. Fetches YouTube's storyboard sprites for the currently playing video and extracts/caches individual timeline hover thumbnails (using ffmpeg) for the OSC. It respects active crop regions from crop.

Trim (trim) ~

Marks an in-point at the current playback position on the first invocation, then cuts out that range into ~/Videos/Recordings/mpv/[filename]/ on the second, either losslessly with -c copy (trim) or re-encoded through ffmpeg using a configurable profile (encode, or encode-<profile> for a named one). It respects active crop regions from crop. Sends a dunstify notification with an "Open Video" action on completion.

Undo (undo) ~

Seeks back to the playback position from before the last seek.

Nohandler (nohandler) ~

Acts as a fallback application for opening files. When a file without a designated default program is opened, this script determines its MIME type (using file) and displays a critical system notification (using dunstify) to inform the user that no handler is configured. Yes, I know... I just didn't find a better name for this one.

Nohandler Generator (nohandler-gen) ~

Generates a fallback nohandler.desktop file in ~/.local/share/applications/ for all unhandled system MIME types. It calculates the difference between available system MIME types (from /usr/share/mime/packages/) and locally handled ones, assigns the leftovers to nohandler, and automatically updates the local desktop database.

Password Prompt (dmenu-pass) ~

Shows a dmenu password prompt for GnuPG, OpenSSH (SSH_ASKPASS), and sudo (SUDO_ASKPASS). For GnuPG and OpenSSH, it uses regular CLI prompts when run from a terminal with a shell prompt (detected by the TTY being in "cooked/canonical mode"), using pinentry-tty for GnuPG. sudo always uses dmenu.

Program Launcher (dmenu-programs) ~

Launches programs specified in ~/.local/share/applications/ (using dmenu), with a --games option to show programs in the "Game" category.

Screen Capture ~

Scripts used to capture the screen in various ways. The default file timestamp is %Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S (ISO 8601).

Screenshot (screenshot) ~

Allows you to capture screenshots (using maim):

• --region; prompts the user to select a window or region (via slop), then captures it.
• --screen; captures the entire screen.
• No options; displays a dmenu menu to choose between the two modes.

Screenshots are saved as .png files in ~/Pictures/Screenshots/.

Screen Recorder (record) ~

Allows you to make screen recordings (using ffmpeg):

• --region; prompts the user to select a window or region (via slop), then records it.
• --screen; records the entire screen.
• --stop; stops an ongoing recording.
• No options; displays a dmenu menu to choose between the two modes, or stop recording.

When recording starts, a new block appears in the status bar (sb-record). Recordings are saved as .mp4 files in ~/Videos/Recordings/.

Statusbar Blocks ~

These scripts can be found under statusbar/, and are invoked by dwmblocks for information on the statusbar:

The blocks are clickable and can invoke some useful commands (see: Keybindings > Statusbar (dwmblocks)).

Wallpaper Changer (wallpaper) ~

Changes the wallpaper and generates a respective colorscheme to sync throughout all programs (using wal). If no file is specified, it displays a nsxiv prompt to choose a wallpaper from ~/Pictures/Wallpapers/. If --random is used, a random image from ~/Pictures/Wallpapers/ is chosen.

Wallpaper Colorscheme Generator (wal) ~

Generates a colorscheme from a wallpaper image to sync throughout all programs (the logic of which is both horrible and shamelessly plagiarized from pywal16/wallust). It extracts and clusters colors from the image, calculates a set colors, adjusts them for sufficient contrast and saturation, and renders the resulting colors into templates in ~/.config/wal/ for use by dunst, mpv, xresources, zathura, and a couple of mpv scripts (crop and mfpbar).

Wrappers ~

These scripts wrap different programs to provide small conveniences.

ncmpcpp ~

This wrapper script simply suppresses the Reading configuration from /home/[username]/.config/ncmpcpp/config... message when launching ncmpcpp.

nsxiv ~

This wrapper script handles URLs (using curl) and caches them. It also adds the -a/--animate and -q/--quiet options (to play animations of multi-frame images and disable warnings to standard error stream).

rtorrent ~

This wrapper script launches rtorrent inside a dedicated tmux session (named rtorrent), attaching to it instead of starting a duplicate instance if it's already running. It also accepts a .torrent file (or magnet link) as an argument, copying it into rtorrent's watch directory (and starting the session first if needed) so it begins downloading, and sends a notification via dunstify.