DOTFILES

Welcome to my dotfiles; You are very welcome to use them 😄

You can take what you like from these dotfiles a la carte, or feel free to use the Quickstart below which will walk you through how I setup a new mac for development.

• Quickstart
• Gotchas
• Language Details
  • node
  • clojure
  • c languages
• Dev Tools
  • Neovim
  • iterm2
  • duti
  • macos
• Extras
  • Aliases
• Graveyard

Quickstart Explained

This setup has been tested on macOS 10.12.x Sierra and up. Some of the commands belows might be specific to my tastes. When this is the case I have added an "optional" label to the step. You can ignore these if you like. Commands beginning with $ are meant to be run in the terminal.

This quickstart is going to run through all the steps required to start using these dotfiles. As much of the process as we're comfortable with automating has been automated. At a high level, here is what you will do (don't worry, it's all explained below in detail):

• Download the dotfiles
• Install Brew
• Brew install everything in the Brewfile
• Symlink dotfiles
• Set the default shell environment to zsh
• Run the setup.sh script
• preferred macOS settings

And with that, let's start with setting up the dotfiles:

• Update macOS
  • upgrade macos

  rationale: we're making sure everything on your system is good to go 😄

• Install Xcode Command Line Tools

  $ xcode-select --install

  Xcode is needed to install dev tools

• move into your home directory

  $ cd ~/

  We will install dotfiles here

• clone this repo

  $ git clone https://github.com/athomasoriginal/dotfiles.git

  This is you installing your dotfiles

• create your own private dotfiles

  $ touch dotfiles/git/.gitconfig.local
  $ touch dotfiles/zsh/.extras

  Our dotfiles are generally public. However, sometimes you will want to have configurations which are specific to your local setup. These files give you the space to have yoru private configurations.

• Install nvm (optional)
• open .gitconfig.local in your editor of choice

  $ vim dotfiles/git/.gitconfig.local

  I have vim selected here because it will be on most peoples machines.

• Configure your .gitconfig.local**

  [user]
    name = <your-git-username>
    email = <your-email>

  More details can be found in local gitconfig

• verify the .macOS file
  • Open .macOS file
  • Update the 3 variables at the top:

    COMPUTERNAME="your-comp-name"
    HOSTNAME='your-host-name'
    LOCALHOSTNAME='your-local-host-name'

  This step is really about choosing what you like and don't like in my .macos file. This file, located at ~dotfiles/.macOS, is a file that configures your mac. Not sure what this means? Well, you know how when you get a mac you have to make decisions like the sensitivty level of your trackpad, or your display settings? Turns out you can automate this setup. This file is going to automate these things for you. With this in mind, these are preferences for how I like to work with my mac. Most are pretty good! The ones that I think may be specific to me are listed below. You should take a look and verify that you want to keep them. Just delete or comment out the stuff you don't want.

  • section - iterm2
    • This is going to tell iterm2 to use the preferences I have setup in these dotfiles. If you do not want them, comment this line out.
  • section - screen:
    • where the screenshots are stored
• verify the brewfile
  • The brewfile contains programs I usually always need. Delete or comment out what you don't need.
• Move into dotfiles dir
• Run the setup script

  $ source setup.sh

  Please note that you will be prompted to enter your computer password while the brew apps are being installed. To see what this is doing, checkout the Setup Explained section

• Open new terminal tab and make sure there are no warnings

Once you have completed the above steps, I like to perform the following steps just as a sanity check:

• restart computer
• verify .zshrc is symlinked correctly

Gotchas

• iterm 2 syntax highlighting not displaying correctly?
  • See iterm2 launch with zsh

Language Details

This section outlines what language configurations exist in our zsh profile and why:

zsh

Our zsh setup comes with the following configurations:

• initialization of oh-my-zsh
• zsh prompt
• A custom theme called "Thomas"
• Support for custom zsh settings: .extras
• Helpful, common aliases
• Zsh Performance optimizations
  • Node - nvm initialization
  • Java - jenv initialization

Custom Zsh Settings

There may be .zshrc aliases or configurations that you may want to keep private, you can create a file called .extras in the zsh directory and this will be picked up by .zsh_profile.

Node

The only thing that is node specific for our setup is nvm. This is a great tool for managing node versions. Now, there is a problem with this tool: it's going to slow down the initialization of your terminal app! Our solution to this is to optimize by adding a loadnvm alias and you run this when you want to use it.

Clojure

Similar to Node and nvm, we use jenv with Java. Yes, this also slows down the initialization of your terminal so we apply a similar performance optimizing strategy.

c languages

Be sure to have ccls installed or the c files won't connect to the ccls lsp server.

Dev Tools

This section outlines how to get started with some of the main tools in my kit. Yes, the Dotfiles installed these things, but there is a little further to go. Why not automate? That requires more testing and maintenance cost than I want to think about right now.

Neovim

The following are some notes for getting up and running with nvim based on the configurations in these dotfiles.

• Install packer
• Install Rust and Cargo
  • This is required to use the parinfer-rust nvim plugin
• Install and Build parinfer-rust
• Install ripgrep for live_search with telescope
• Install zprint
  • This is for Clojure development
  • brew install zprint
• Install Nerd Font
  • This is required to use the nvim-web-devicons
  • Note: if the fonts aren't working in nvim, check iTerm2 profiles > Text and make sure they're set correctly.
• Open Nvim
• Install Plugins

  :PlugInstall

  The casing is important

Gotchas

• If vim-prettier can't find the prettier exe:
  • move to ~/.vim/plugged/vim-prettier
  • run yarn install

  This should be a last resort though as our configuration of this plugin should just do this for us automatically. Also note that if you don't autoload nvm like me, run that first.

Delete Nvim

Assumes it's installed via brew

• uninstall

  brew uninstall nvim

iterm2

• Settings
  • I activate scroll functionality so you can just use the trackpad for long pieces of text. For example, try typing man defaults into your terminal. When you have to scroll this kind of long document in your terminal, it can get janky. This helps to avoid that.
• Color Themes
  • Solarized - especially amazing if you ever code outside or in a room with a lot of sunlight
• hotkeys
  • command + d will bring up iterm2 when in the background - very handy when you are an active terminal user - something I picked up from guake terminal

duti

duti is a program built to make it easier to configure which filetypes are opened by which application. For example, lets say you want all .html files to be opened by Sublime and not the default browser, we can configure this in Duti. For more info, see the .duti file.

macos

• Preferences by the commandline

Extras

These are some helpful extras which I figure could be helpful to just show people

Aliases

• Count lines by file type

  alias repocount="git ls-files | grep '\.clj' | xargs wc -l"

Graveyard

This section is for my fallen Homies. 🪦 🍻

• Atom - Mid 2022
  • I transitioned away from Atom because Github decided to end its life once Github was bought by Microsoft. Additionally though, it was getting long in the tooth regarding speed. Either way though, it was, and still is, a better IDE than VScode.