egoexpress does dotfiles

This is largely based on the excellent work of Zack Holman and his awesome dotfiles project. Check out this project to learn more about the philosophy behind it.

I changed some minor facts and took the bits from the original project that I liked. I then added oh-my-zsh on top of it (because that's the zsh environment I'm used too), so we now have some kind of Frankenstein zsh monster. :) A method to better handle private data (within a separate ~/.private repository) was added as well.

Topics

Everything's built around topic areas. If you're adding a new area to your forked dotfiles — say, "Java" — you can simply add a java directory and put files in there. Anything with an extension of .zsh will get automatically included into your shell. Anything with an extension of .symlink will get symlinked without extension into $HOME when you run dotfiles/bin/bootstrap.

Components

There's a few special files in the hierarchy.

• topic/*.zsh: Any files ending in .zsh get loaded into your environment.
• topic/path.zsh: Any file named path.zsh is loaded first and is expected to setup $PATH or similar.
• topic/completion.zsh: Any file named completion.zsh is loaded last and is expected to setup autocomplete.
• topic/install.sh: Any file named install.sh is executed when you run dotfiles/bin/install. To avoid being loaded automatically, its extension is .sh, not .zsh.
• topic/*.symlink: Any file ending in *.symlink gets symlinked into your $HOME. This is so you can keep all of those versioned in your dotfiles but still keep those autoloaded files in your home directory. These get symlinked in when you run dotfiles/bin/bootstrap.

Private Information

To handle private information a separate filesystem hierarchy under ~/.private was introduced. You can place .zsh files which are loaded through dotfiles/bin/install as well. The .symlink function works here as well.

I also introduced a .relative naming scheme to mix in configuration files with private information. So, if you e.g. use WeeChat, some configuration files contain private information you don't want to have in a public repo. So you can split the .weechat dir as following:

• ~/.dotfiles/weechat/weechat.symlink contains all the files without private infos. This dir will be linked at ~/.weechat.
• ~/.private/weechat/weechat.relative contains all the other files with private information. Symlinks in ~/.weechat will be created for each of these files.

Prerequisites

Your user should run zsh as the primary shell.

Install

Run this:

git clone https://github.com/egoexpress/dotfiles.git ~/.dotfiles
git clone https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh.git ~/.oh-my-zsh
cd ~/.dotfiles
dotfiles/bin/bootstrap
dotfiles/bin/install

This will symlink the appropriate files in .dotfiles to your home directory. Everything is configured and tweaked within ~/.dotfiles.

The main file you'll want to change right off the bat is zsh/zshrc.symlink, which sets up a few paths that'll be different on your particular machine.

dot is a simple script that installs some dependencies, sets sane defaults, and so on. Tweak this script, and occasionally run dot from time to time to keep your environment fresh and up-to-date. You can find this script in dotfiles/bin/.

Thanks

The original dotfiles project is released under the MIT license and copyrighted by Zack Holman. See that project for any additional info.