These are my dotfiles. There are many like them, but these ones are mine.
TL;DR: Configuration files for programs/commands in UNIX-like Operating Systems (like GNU/Linux).
Assume for a moment you want to configure a program (e.g. change the default background color of your terminal emulator). It's certainly doable... but where are those changes saved?
In UNIX and its derivatives everything is a file, and naturally, when you
configure a program, that config is saved in a file, which is located in the
your home directory ($HOME, aka ~, aka /home/<your username>/).
You don't want those files and directories to be visible by default: Someone may mess with them or delete them by mistake. Hiding them from the common sight sounds like a good idea.
In UNIX-like OSs, files whose name start with a dot (.) are hidden by
default. This behavior wasn't intended, it a happy accident from the
programmers of the original UNIX, and was subsequently inherited by UNIX
derivatives. Rob Pike wrote on the origin of dot file names.
That's where the name dotfiles comes from.
TL;DR: In $XDG_CONFIG_HOME if they're cool. $HOME otherwise.
In ancient times (from the 70's up to early 2000's), user-wide configurations
lived in hidden files and directories directly under $HOME, like
/home/user/.vimrc and /home/user/.mutt/, respectively. This worked, but
you could end up with a lot of hidden files in your home directory.
Then someone came with a brilliant idea: Why don't we standardize user directories? And that's how the XDG Base Directory Specification was born.
The XDG spec says that user configs must be located inside the
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME, which defaults to $HOME/.config/ (aka
/home/user/.config/). With this, almost all config files are organized under
one directory.
Download the repository, change the current working directory to the repo, run the script:
git clone <git-repo-url> .dotfiles
cd .dotfiles
./install.shThis work is under the UNLICENSE - see the UNLICENSE file for details.