xrobin does dotfiles

dotfiles

Your dotfiles are how you personalize your system. These are mine.

I was a little tired of having long alias files and everything strewn about (which is extremely common on other dotfiles projects, too). That led to this project being much more topic-centric. I realized I could split a lot of things up into the main areas I used (Ruby, git, system libraries, and so on), so I structured the project accordingly.

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/xrobin/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.

personalize

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.

.bashrc vs .bash_profile vs .bash_login vs .profile

This is really all handled here, and you should never have to care about .bash_profile or .bash_login. Put all your environment variables in .profile. Put anything for interactive use or that is bash-specific in .bashrc

prompt

You'll want to change PS1 in ~/.bashrc (you can edit either ~/.bashrc or ~/bashrc.symlink). Try to set DATE_PROMPT=true for instance.

components

There's a few special files in the hierarchy.

• bin/*.bin: Any *.bin file in bin/ will get symlinked to ~/bin/, which is added to your $PATH and be made available everywhere.
• system/: Files that are usually useful to have around on new system installs. Nothing is done automatically, typically those would be installed manually as root.
• 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.
• script/: Scripts to install the dotfiles. Use script/bootstrap upon first use, and again every time a new file gets added. You can run script/bootstrap as many times as you want, that shouldn't have any adverse effect: just hit S to skip everything that is already set.

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.

I use them on a variety of MacOS X, Debian/Ubuntu and SuSE Linux systems, where they should install and run pretty smoothly. Everything else is pretty much untested.

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

I forked Holman's dotfiles, then pretty much everything except from script/bootstrap was changed. I'm not using zsh myself.