About

This directory houses copies of the configuration files and templates for my personal setup. That includes all of my dotfiles and my folder of vim plugins.

Adding New Plugins in my.vimrc

Since I always download the plugins from Github, I need to take proper care to install them as a git submodule so that they can be tracked and updated correctly. So for a new plugin, rather than running the usual

cd ConfigurationTemplates/my.vim/bundle
git clone http://github.com/user1/some-plugin.git

I need to run

cd ConfigurationTemplates/
git submodule add http://github.com/user1/some-plugin.git my.vim/bundle/some-plugin

Now all of these submodules then show up in the .gitmodules file. All I need to do is add and commit that along with the new folder.

Getting Started on a New System or Server

Downloading This Repo and All Vim Plugins

On a new system, I start by first cloning this repo to some local directory like ~/Documents/ (though any works, really).

Then after cloning, I run

cd /path/to/repo/ConfigurationTemplates/
git submodule update --init

This will then pull download all of the plugins I need from Github.

Once downloaded, if the plugins have been updated on Github with bug patches or changes, you can download the latest changes by running

git submodule foreach git pull origin master

Using these Files

To get a new system or server to use these files as my configuration files, I use symlinks (rather than copying and pasting).

For example, I have my system's ~/.tmux.conf simply be a pointer to the .tmux.conf file in this repo. That way, when I update this file on one, commit, and run git pull on another machine, all of the plugins will automatically be synced and updated.

To set this up (taking the .tmux.conf example), I run

cd
ln -s /path/to/gitrepo/.tmux.conf .tmux.conf

Done. Now when tmux opens and looks for the .tmux.conf directory, it will be redirected to this git repo (saved locally somewhere else on my system and easily synced/updated with a git pull).