Setting up a Chrome OS Development Environment

Terminal Setup

After a bunch of playing around for a good terminal replacement, I stumbled upon a Reddit thread that help me install Tilix. I was looking for a good iTerm 2 replacement, and this comes really close! The key bits from that thread, to get Tilix running, are as follows:

$ echo 'deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian stretch-backports main' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/stretch-backports.list
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt -y install tilix
$ sudo ln -s /etc/profile.d/vte-2.91.sh /etc/profile.d/vte.sh

This will add Stretch Backports as an apt source, update the apt source, and install Tilix. The last line symlinks vte.sh so Tilix can use it. The final thing you need to do is source that in your .bashrc or .zshrc file.

if [ $TILIX_ID ] || [ $VTE_VERSION ]; then
    source /etc/profile.d/vte.sh
fi

With that set up, Tilix became launchable from the Chrome OS launcher and pinnable!

Next, I wanted to use zsh instead of bash. I love Oh My Zsh, which is an open source zsh configuration management framework, so I went to work installing that. Installation is a fairly straight forward, simply run sudo apt-get install zsh wget and we had zsh! We also install wget here because it doesn’t come with our Linux container, and then use that to follow the standard Oh My Zsh install instructions. I also recommend using the z, shrink-path, and zsh-syntax-highlighting zsh plugins; they’re real productivity and quality-of-life enhancements for my terminal.

Finally, it’s time to edit settings for Tilix! Open Tilix, click the top-left icon, and hit Preferences. From there, either edit the Default profile, or create a new one, go to the Command tab, check Run a custom command instead of my shell, and under the command, type zsh. This will make Tilix run zsh! Then, go ahead and customize both the terminal and zsh to your liking!

While you’re in Tilix preferences, you should play around with the shortcuts they provide. I like app-like shortcuts, like CTRL+C/CTRL+V for copy/paste, so go ahead and change those yo our heart’s content

One last bit that may come in handy; if you’re using a zsh theme that makes use of Powerline fonts (like I do), you’ll need do a little bit extra to get them installed. After downloading the fonts I wanted, I followed another Reddit thread to install the fonts I need. The steps are:

1. Create a folder named .fonts in the home (~) directory
2. Copy the font files to install into that folder
3. Run fc-cache -fv to verbosely force the cache to rebuild.

Once done, go back in to your profile under Tilix preferences and use the newly installed fonts!

Web Development Environment

With the terminal squared away, it’s now time to set up a web dev environment! The first thing on my list was installing a better text editor. It turns out that Visual Studio Code not only is available for Debian, but it runs beautifully on our new setup! Download the .deb file from their site, save it to the Linux files folder, and then from your terminal, in the folder you downloaded the .deb file, run sudo dpkg -i visual-studio-install-filename.deb, replacing the last bit with the actual filename. That’s it! You’ve got full VS Code now!

The final bit I really need is a Node environment. Instead of installing Node directly, I prefer using NVM (Node Version Manager) coupled with AVN (Automatic Version Switching for Node). The installation instructions that are provided for both work wonders. The only caution I have here that you need to install NVM and a version of Node before installing AVN because AVN requires a Node install. With both installed, the bottom of my ~/.zshrc file looks like this:

# Node Version Manager and ANV
export NVM_DIR="$HOME/.nvm"
[ -s "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh" ] && \. "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh"  # This loads nvm
[ -s "$NVM_DIR/bash_completion" ] && \. "$NVM_DIR/bash_completion"  # This loads nvm bash_completion
[[ -s "$HOME/.avn/bin/avn.sh" ]] && source "$HOME/.avn/bin/avn.sh" # load avn
export PATH="/usr/local/bin:$PATH"

I also enable the node, npm, and nvm plugins for zsh.

Migrating from a Mac

If you’re coming from a Mac, one of the biggest pain points I found was the keyboard and trackpad are, by default, set up to mimic Windows. This can be resolved in settings, though! From the App Launcher, open Settings, then navigate (from the hamburger menu) to Device. Under Touchpad, you can set scrolling to Australian, or natural scrolling in the Mac world, and under Keyboard, swap the Ctrl and Alt keys. If you wind up constantly hitting the Google Assistant button in between the keyboard’s Ctrl and Alt keys like I do, unfortunately that can’t be remapped as of this writing, so the only way to stop that is by disabling Google Assistant entirely. I think that if and when that can be remapped, I’ll probably re-enable Assistant and assign it to the Ctrl key, and have the assistant key be the new Alt (so Alt key === Ctrl, Assistant key === Alt, Ctrl key === Assistant, as opposed to Assistant key being disabled now, and Ctrl key === Alt currently). Finally, under Displays, you can change the Internal Display size. I set mine so it looks like 1500 x 1000 which is closest to my previous Mac’s 1440 x 900 display. Change this to your liking.

The last thing that may be missing are some familiar and useful CLI commands; specifically, the open command, and pbcopy/pbpaste. They aren’t natively available in Debian, so we’ll need to roll our own.

To tackle open, in ~/.zshrc, add the following function:

open() {
  setsid nohup xdg-open $1 > /dev/null 2> /dev/null
}

This will open whatever file or folder name is passed in, in the default application, in a new, effectively detached session, emulating how OSX’s open command works.

For pbcopy and pbpaste (copying to and pasting from the clipboard), I followed an article that had me install xclip (sudo apt-get install xclip) and then add the following aliases to my ~/.zshrc file:

alias pbcopy='xclip -selection clipboard'
alias pbpaste='xclip -selection clipboard -o'

There’s also a Linux port of Homebrew called Linuxbrew which looks interesting, but I haven’t investigated it yet.

Final Thoughts

I consider myself somewhat of a power Mac user so getting my new Pixelbook set up to my liking is a must in order for me to feel comfortable using it. There are still some gaps; I’d like to be able to change all of the global keyboard shortcuts (specifically, missing CMD+Tab to move through applications and CMD+~ to move through application windows, the equivelant here would be Ctrl instead of CMD), and while the Pixelbook has great mouse-centric window snapping, I’m really missing keyboard shortcuts for window sizing and placement, like with Divvy or Spectacle. I’m also missing multitouch gestures, which I use extensively and extensively customize with BetterTouchTool.

There’s also another issue I’ve run in to though; the death by a thousand papercuts of tools you’re likely use to or dependent on that don’t have great web-based or Linux, like the Adobe suite, Sketch, 1Password, and other Mac and/or Windows-centric desktop apps. Some of these have Android alternatives that can be installed through the Play store on Chrome OS, but for many, you’ll just need to go without for now.

On the other hand, Progressive Web Apps are treated as fabulous first-class citizens on Chrome OS, with you being able to install them and have them be treated, for all intents and purposes, as any other app. Twitter’s PWA, for example, works great installed. Because of how well these work, and the progress with which WebAssembly is coming along, I can see a future in which some of these desktop apps are able to be ported to the web and installed as a PWA, but I think that ma still be a bit far off for now.