Voidrice: dotfiles that treat the home directory as a place to keep empty

Dotfiles with a YouTube channel attached

Voidrice is the dotfile collection of Luke Smith, deployed by LARBS, his installation script, and as seen on his YouTube channel, which makes it one of the few dotfile repositories with a built in audience, since thousands of viewers have watched these exact files in use before deciding to run them. The repository is plain Shell by primary language and GPL-3.0 licensed, with no GitHub releases because dotfiles ship by commit, and the last push landed 2026-09-10. The collection is opinionated by design, it is one person's working environment published as a whole rather than a theme to be assembled, and its coherence is the product, the same reason people watch the channel that uses it.

Keeping the home directory clean

The organizing principle is stated as a goal, I try to minimize what's directly in ~, pursued with two mechanisms. All configs that can live in ~/.config/ are there, and for programs that insist on writing elsewhere, some environmental variables have been set in ~/.zprofile to move their configs into ~/.config/ anyway, the XDG redirection trick that catches legacy tools. The repository root shows the discipline, only .xprofile and .zprofile sit at the top level beside the .config and .local trees, so a fresh clone adds almost nothing visible to ls in the home directory. The payoff is practical, dotfile management becomes two directories to version rather than a hunt through dozens of hidden files scattered by decades of convention.

Bookmarks as plain text files

Navigation runs on two text files, file bookmarks in ~/.config/shell/bm-files and directory bookmarks in ~/.config/shell/bm-dirs, consumed by various scripts, with ~/.local/bin/shortcuts named as the example that turns them into shell shortcuts. The design choice is characteristic, bookmarks are just lines in plain text, editable with any editor, diffable in git, and readable by anything, rather than state trapped inside a file manager's database. Change the file, rerun the script, and the shortcuts update. It is the same philosophy as the rest of the collection, prefer the dumbest durable format and build small scripts on top of it, which is also why the scripts directory under ~/.local/bin is described as containing very useful scripts worth browsing first.

The suckless trio it expects

The usage section names the environment these dotfiles are intended for, three suckless programs from the author's own forks, dwm as the window manager, dwmblocks as the statusbar feeding it modular status information, and st as the terminal emulator. These are the consumers and complements of the configuration, dwm's statusbar reads what dwmblocks assembles, and the shell and editor configs assume st's behavior and key handling. The dotfiles and the forked programs form one distributed setup split across repositories, and someone assembling the environment manually needs all of them plus the dotfiles to get what LARBS produces automatically, which is precisely the integration the installer exists to handle.

mutt-wizard for email

Email is the one major component delegated to a companion project, mutt-wizard, recommended alongside the setup and described as giving an easy to install terminal based email client regardless of your email provider, unusual among terminal mail setups for handling the account provisioning pain automatically. It is integrated into these dotfiles as well, meaning the neovim and shell configuration here already contains the hooks and bindings mutt-wizard expects, so installing it on top of Voidrice is configuration free rather than another afternoon of alignment. For a terminal centric setup, having mail solved in the same idiom as everything else closes the last gap that usually pushes people back to a browser.

Two install paths

Installation is either automatic or manual. The automatic path runs LARBS to install everything, fetched with one line:

curl -LO larbs.xyz/larbs.sh

after which the script deploys these dotfiles along with the full program set. The manual path clones the repository's files directly into the home directory and installs the dependencies, whose authoritative list lives in LARBS as a progs.csv file, the same manifest the installer consumes. The two paths converge on the same result, but the manual one assumes you already know what the dependencies are and why, which is the difference between adopting a setup and assembling it.

A credited wallpaper and a two-file root

Two closing details round out the repository's character. The default desktop artwork is Thomas Thiemeyer's painting The Road to Samarkand, credited with the artist's social links, an unusually human touch in a dotfile collection, most ship a default background without attribution. And the repository structure stays minimal at every level, .config and .local trees, the two profile files, a .gitmodules for included submodules, a funding file for supporters, and nothing else, which matches the home directory philosophy applied to the repository itself. Under GPL-3.0, the collection is free to fork and remix, and its long history of public use on YouTube makes it one of the most observed starting points in the dotfile world.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt Voidrice whole through LARBS if you want Luke Smith's exact setup reproduced on a fresh Arch system in one command, or mine it selectively if you only want its XDG discipline, bookmark files or specific program configs for your own dotfiles. It is not for Windows or macOS users, the assumptions are Linux and a set of suckless tools from the same author's forks. Before installing, read the LARBS dependency list so you know what will land on the system, back up any existing dotfiles since cloning into the home directory overwrites, and expect the setup's opinions, minimal home directory, terminal centric programs, to be the point rather than an inconvenience.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. License: GPL-3.0
3. LukeSmithxyz/voidrice on GitHub
4. README