A clear way of managing dotfiles

Copied from the excellent holman dotfiles project.

This project is topic-centric. Folders represent the main areas, e.g. Ruby, git, system libraries, and so on.

Main Features

• Auto-symlinks anything called *.symlink into your ~/ dir.
• antigen == an extraordinary package manager for ZSH, with a curated set of plugins.
• Brewfile and shell script to run brew bundle install. It installs all the best homebrew packages for development.

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 to do

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/install.sh: Any file named install.sh is executed when you run script/install. To avoid being loaded automatically, its extension is .sh, not .zsh.
• topic/*.symlink: Any file ending in *.symlink gets 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.

For antigen, I had to include all the plugins in one file, antigen-packages.zsh, in the zsh/ folder, because it needs an init, the plugins, then a command to tell it to finish. Otherwise the zshrc loads all .zsh files in alphabetical order.

install

Run this:

git clone https://github.com/dukejones/dotfiles.git ~/.dotfiles
cd ~/.dotfiles
script/bootstrap
# on mac
homebrew/install.sh
homebrew/install-brewfile.sh
# for the very adventurous
macos/set-defaults.sh

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 macOS 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/.

bugs

I want this to work for everyone; that means when you clone it down it should work for you even though you may not have rbenv installed, for example. That said, I do use this as my dotfiles, so there's a good chance I may break something if I forget to make a check for a dependency.

If you're brand-new to the project and run into any blockers, please open an issue on this repository and I'd love to get it fixed for you!

thanks

Of course holman the original.

Also bynen is very detail oriented but I got the macos set-defaults.sh magic from him.