My dotfiles

These dotfiles are configured for OSX, but you may find that some of it applies to other *NIX systems. I'm using alacritty as my terminal, and the nord theme. The configuration relies on Nerd Font symbols; personally I'm using Hack (which is installed by the Brewfile), but any Nerd Font will work.

The Brewfile will install a suite of software I tend to install on all of my machines. For development, I use asdf to manage CLI tool versions, neovim as my editor, bash as my shell, and tmux to make my terminal more powerful; the latest version of these will be installed by the Brewfile, as well as a few other command line tools I find useful as a developer:

• bat - like cat but better
• docker - installs Docker for Mac; no virtualbox required
• fd - like find but way easier
• fzf - fuzzy matching for file names and command completion
• jq - parse json on the command line
• ripgrep - like grep but way faster
• thefuck - for fixing common typos
• tig - for navigating git history
• tldr - like man pages but more condensed

The Brewfile will also install some other programs that I tend to install on all of my machines, such as:

• alfred - like Spotlight but more powerful
• flux - save your eyes from the blue light
• keybase - encryption with friends
• stay - make windows stay put, even when switching monitors

Installation

All of the software you'll need is installed by homebrew, so the first thing you'll want to do is install that. See the website for instructions.

Clone this repo to your home directory. The name you give the repo doesn't matter, but it'll make your life easier if it's in your home directory. For example, this will name the directory ~/.dotfiles:

git clone https://github.com/bmatcuk/dotfiles.git ~/.dotfiles

Next, run the following in this directory to install all the software:

cd ~/.dotfiles
brew bundle

Setup

After all of the software is installed, you'll need to run a few commands to setup the software:

Install the tmux-256color.terminfo:

sudo tic -xe tmux-256color tmux-256color.terminfo

To use the version of bash installed by homebrew instead of OSX's default (outdated) version of bash, run:

echo "/usr/local/bin/bash" | sudo tee -a /etc/shells
chsh -s /usr/local/bin/bash

dotfiles

Now that everything is setup, you can use stow to create symbolic links to the dotfiles. These instructions assume that you've cloned this repo to your home directory as suggested above. If you have not, you'll need to set stow's "target directory" to your home directory. See stow's documentation.

dotfiles for each utility are in their own directory. For example, to install my bash dotfiles, you'd simply run the following while in this repo's directory:

stow bash

Each dotfile can be installed individually by running stow on the appropriate directories.

In addition to configuration for various command line tools, I also have some configuration for a few linting tools. These are located in directories named after the programming language, such as javascript or css.

bat

If you decide to use the bat dotfiles, you'll need to run the following after running stow bat:

bat cache --build

bash and fzf

After installing fzf and running stow bash, you need to install the fzf bash scripts:

$(brew --prefix fzf)/install --no-zsh --no-fish

Answer yes to auto-completion and key bindings, but answer no to updating the shell configuration file.

tmux

After running stow tmux and starting tmux, install plugins by typing prefix + I - that's the tmux prefix (typically Ctrl+B) followed by Shift+i.

nvim

Before running stow nvim, you'll want to create a directory for the nvim config, otherwise vim-plug will end up creating a directory that'll be symlinked back into this repo.

mkdir -p ~/.config/nvim
stow nvim

After running stow nvim, you'll need to install python3 and node (maybe via asdf, homebrew, or your favorite method). Next, you'll need to install vim-plug and then run:

pip3 install pynvim
nvim +PlugInstall +UpdateRemotePlugins

gnupg

Like nvim, you'll want to create the config directory before running stow:

mkdir ~/.gnupg
chmod 0700 ~/.gnupg
stow gnupg

Fortune and Cowsay

The files for fortune and cowsay must be linked using /usr/local/share as the stow target directory. To do that, run:

stow -t /usr/local/share fortune
stow -t /usr/local/share cowsay

If you're on OSX and fortune/cowsay have been installed via homebrew, stow will complain that it does not "own" the appropriate directories because they're already symlinks. Instead, you'll need to use the full path into the homebrew "Cellar":

stow -t "$(brew --prefix fortune)/share" fortune
stow -t "$(brew --prefix cowsay)/share" cowsay

The cowsay files come from Paul Kaefer's excellent cowsay-files repo. I have not included the true color cows, and I removed ghostbusters.cow and vader.cow because my install of cowsay already included them.

Local Modifications

Sometimes you want to make changes to configs on a per-machine basis. For example, you might need some work-specific environment variables. Some configs have support for importing files for this purpose so you don't need to worry about accidentally committing these things to git:

• ~/.bash_profile.local
• ~/.gitconfig.local
• ~/.ssh/config.local
• ~/.config/nvim/local.vim

Some Manual Changes

Here are a few manual changes I make when setting up a new system:

Set the Dock size and make the size immutable

defaults write com.apple.dock tilesize -int 32
defaults write com.apple.dock size-immutable -bool yes
killall Dock