dotfiles

I discovered dotfiles and the way to finally be more DRY when I setup a system or have to start over. It's a slippery slope of all the things you can do, here's a repo of my journey.

If you're interested in the philosophy behind why projects like these are awesome, you might want to read Holman's post on the subject.

Install

Run this:

git clone https://github.com/chuckcarpenter/dotfiles.git ~/.dotfiles
cd ~/.dotfiles
script/bootstrap

This will symlink the appropriate files in .dotfiles to your home directory. Everything is configured and tweaked within ~/.dotfiles.

The main file you'll want to change right off the bat is zsh/zshrc.symlink, which sets up a few paths that'll be different on your particular machine.

dot is a simple script that installs some dependencies, sets sane OS X defaults, and so on. Tweak this script, and occasionally run dot from time to time to keep your environment fresh and up-to-date. You can find this script in bin/.

Topical

Everything's built around topic areas. If you're adding a new area to your forked dotfiles — say, "Java" — you can simply add a java directory and put files in there. Anything with an extension of .zsh will get automatically included into your shell. Anything with an extension of .symlink will get symlinked without extension into $HOME when you run script/bootstrap.

What's inside

A lot of stuff. Seriously, a lot of stuff. Check them out in the file browser above and see what components may mesh up with you. Fork it, remove what you don't use, and build on what you do use.

Components

There's a few special files in the hierarchy.

• bin/: Anything in bin/ will get added to your $PATH and be made available everywhere.
• topic/*.zsh: Any files ending in .zsh get loaded into your environment.
• topic/path.zsh: Any file named path.zsh is loaded first and is expected to setup $PATH or similar.
• topic/completion.zsh: Any file named completion.zsh is loaded last and is expected to setup autocomplete.
• topic/*.symlink: Any files ending in *.symlink get symlinked into your $HOME. This is so you can keep all of those versioned in your dotfiles but still keep those autoloaded files in your home directory. These get symlinked in when you run script/bootstrap.

Thanks

I forked this from Zach Holman's dotfiles repo and started the journey into customizing my sytem and saving those preferences for future use. You should do something of the same, perhaps start with his or do a simple Github search for dotfiles and see what works for you.