Cameron Little's dotfiles

This was original forked from @holman's dotfiles, but due to some limitations of forked repositories on GitHub I've unforked.

I'm using a variation of his system to organize and propagate my configurations across machines. The actual contents were inspired from a multitude of sources which I've tried to attribute inline.

Setup

Run this:

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

This will symlink the appropriate files in .dotfiles to your home directory and configure your machine, which may require your input. Everything is configured and tweaked within that ~/.dotfiles folder.

It adds a dotfiles command to your PATH to manage your dotfiles.

Run dotfiles periodically to keep everything up to date.

Run dotfiles --install to run system-level installers for various tools. This will take a while, so it's not automatic.

Run dotfiles --edit to open your dotfiles for editing.

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.

Everything's built around topic areas. If you're adding a new area to your forked dotfiles — say, "SNOBOL" — you can simply add a snobol directory and put files in there.

There's a few special files and file types in the hierarchy.

• bin/: Anything in bin/ will get added to your $PATH and be made available everywhere.
• *.symlink: Any file ending in *.symlink gets symlinked into your $HOME. This keeps these versioned in your dotfiles while letting them be autoloaded by various programs from your home directory. These are symlinked when you run script/bootstrap.
• *.bash: Files ending in *.bash gets sourced into bash (I use bash 5). This lets you split up your bash configuration into more logical, topic based chunks.
• appsupport: This is a map of files that should be linked to macOS's application support directory. This is useful for programs like VSCode that use this config location.

macOS configuration

I've got most of my must-have applications auto-installed through homebrew and have some utilities to automatically update the config. See ./homebrew.

I also have a system for automatically syncing macOS system and application configuration. See ./macos/defaults.

Bash prompt

My bash prompt attempts to balance between minimalism, information, and aesthetics.

The prompt adapts to the context of the current environment and directory. Along with the standard user, hostname, and directory information the prompt also indicates:

• connected over ssh
• git branch
• go version
• in docker container
• kubernetes context
• nodejs version
• readonly cwd
• root user

I use some concurrency to improve the speed of collecting this information.

The prompt is prefixed with the ❯ character, which I feel makes it less likely that a copy/paste will lead to running something unexpectedly.

The informational and input parts of the prompt are split between two lines. This makes the current command and command history easier to read and copy, since commands are less likely to wrap.

username@hostname:/current/working/directory (extra) (information)
❯ 

I make heavy use of readline's .inputrc to make it easier to edit and rerun commands.

Failed commands will show their exit code, translated into a more human readable form.

Docker image

A github action maintains a docker image I use to quickly debug docker and kubernetes with a familiar shell and debugging tools.

On dotfiles --install, it's tagged locally as toolbox and can be started with docker run --rm -it toolbox.

To run in a docker network named my_network:

docker run --rm -it --network=my_network toolbox

To try it somewhere else, run

docker run --rm -it ghcr.io/apexskier/dotfiles/toolbox:latest

It's also available in docker hub as apexskier/toolbox.