My Dotfiles

Configurations and optimisations primarily for Zsh, Neovim, and Spacemacs.

Please be aware that these configurations are designed for my own personal use. You are of course welcome to make use of whatever you find here, but do understand that I take no responsibility for anything that backfires on your machine. (There’s really nothing scary in here. Just a word of caution.)

Credits

The dotfiles are managed with rcm by Thoughtbot, which is an awesome, lightweight tool for keeping dotfiles synced and organised.

Some Zsh and Git configurations have been borrowed from the YADR dotfiles repository. I have attempted to make mention of all of these instances within the code to give credit where it is due.

What’s included

Zsh and Git

I use Zgen to manage my ZSH plugins, because it is awesome. Zgen is sourced and applied (and relevant plugins are called) all from the .zshrc file. It is installed as a submodule of this repo.

The gitconfig included is primarily borrowed from YADR, and includes some sensible aliases and defaults for Git’s CLI. User-specific Git configurations should be stored in ~/.gitconfig.user.

Also provided are a small number of convenient Zsh aliases — take a look at them here.

Please note that:

• any private info (e.g. API tokens, etc) should be stored in a ~/.secrets file, which is sourced automatically if it exists
• any private aliases (e.g. server ssh logins, etc) should be stored in a ~/.aliases.user.zsh, which is also sourced automatically if it exists

Neovim

Neovim is like Vim, but (in my humble opinion) better. I particularly love its asynchronous plugin architecture, how fast its development community is growing, and how well maintenance and support is handled. I keep my configuration pretty lean.

Hyper

My config for Hyper is pretty minimal. Word.

Spacemacs

My .spacemacs file specifies the configuration layers I use on a regular basis, which are mostly aimed at HTML, CSS, and JS development. In particular, the JS syntax checking is tuned for ESLint. I’ve also bound meta to the fn key, which allows me to use the left opt key for inserting diacritics and special characters. I don’t use Spacemacs much anymore but am keeping this around for now.

Usage (OS X)

These instructions have been tested on my own machine (OS X 10.11, using the latest version of iTerm2). They presume that you do not already have a .dotfiles directory in your user (~) directory.

Prerequisites

• Homebrew
• Correct Hombrew permissions: sudo chown -R "$USER":admin /usr/local && sudo chown -R "$USER":admin /Library/Caches/Homebrew
• Node and npm
• Non-system install of Python (brew install python / brew install python3)
• Pip (This will be installed alongside Python from Homebrew, see above)
• Neovim
• Ag (brew install ag) in order for FZF to work with the default command
• Pure (npm install -g pure-prompt)

Install

# Install Zsh
brew install zsh

# Add zsh to standard shells
sudo vi /etc/shells              # Add /usr/local/bin/zsh to the end of this file

# Switch into Zsh — don’t worry if it looks like crap for the moment
chsh -s /usr/local/bin/zsh

# Clone the repo to into a ".dotfiles" directory in your user directory
git clone git@github.com:colepeters/dotfiles.git ~/.dotfiles

# Switch to the new directory
cd ~/.dotfiles

# Initialise and update Zgen submodule
git submodule init && git submodule update

# Install RCM
brew tap thoughtbot/formulae
brew install rcm

# Copy the RCM config file to your ~ directory first
rcup -v rcrc

# Generate symlinked dotfiles in your ~ directory
rcup -v

Additional packages

Some aliases and configurations depend on these little packages to work:

# Some Neovim packages (e.g. deoplete) require Neovim with `if_python3`
pip3 install neovim

# diff-so-fancy, for better git diffs:
npm install -g diff-so-fancy

# Tig, a Git CLI wrapper:
brew install tig

# HTTPie, a nice cURL replacement:
brew install httpie

# flake8, for linting Python files
pip install flake8

Optional add-ons

These CLI applications make my life easier:

# Standard, a great JS standard that I use when not writing to an eslintrc spec
# (Also Snazzy, which gives a prettier output when running Standard on the CLI)
npm i -g standard snazzy

# tldr, aka quick and useful documentation for CLI commands
npm i -g tldr

# Ranger file manager
brew install ranger

🎉 Ta-da

You should now be able to open a new shell session and have everything be not horrible and hopefully cooler and ready to go.

Worh repeating:

• any private info (e.g. GitHub tokens, etc) should be stored in a ~/.secrets file, which is sourced automatically if it exists
• any private aliases (e.g. server ssh logins, etc) should be stored in a ~/.aliases.user.zsh, which is also sourced automatically if it exists