Mike North's Dotfiles

These are my own dotfiles

What these affect

• zsh and oh-my-zsh
• git
  • Multi-identity environment, with independent SSH keys and .gitconfig for employee & OSS work
  • vscode as a difftool and mergetool
  • nano as a core.editor
  • dozens of other small settings for improved UX
• macos settings and preferences
• nano with syntax highlighting, linting and formatting
• editorconfig
• a Brewfile that installs a bunch of packages I regularly need

How I use them

I have a dotfiles alias defined in my .zshrc that lets me treat these dotfiles as a git repo.

You can set these up for yourself by running

# create a git repo to track changes
git init --bare $HOME/.cfg
# If you fork this repo, remember to update the repo name in the next line!
git --git-dir=$HOME/.cfg/ --work-tree=$HOME remote add origin git@github.com:mike-north/dotfiles
git --git-dir=$HOME/.cfg/ --work-tree=$HOME fetch
git --git-dir=$HOME/.cfg/ --work-tree=$HOME reset --hard origin/master
git --git-dir=$HOME/.cfg/ --work-tree=$HOME branch --set-upstream-to origin/master

Close your terminal and open a new one. At this point you should have a dotfiles alias defined

which dotfiles
> dotfiles: aliased to /usr/bin/git --git-dir=/Users/mnorth/.cfg/ --work-tree=/Users/mnorth

At this point you can kind of use dotconfig as if it's a specialized git command, but just for these files in your home folder (and any others you may explicitly add)

Setup the remote for your repo (it may point to your fork of this repo)

dotfiles remote add origin <repo url>
dotfiles fetch origin
dotfiles --reset hard origin master

Now you should be able to manage your own dotfiles as if they're a git repo

# stage a file with changes
dotfiles add .zshrc
# make a commit
dotfiles commit -m "Update my zshrc"
# push changes up to your repo
dotfiles push

Inspired by (and borrowed from)

• https://github.com/stefanpenner/dotfiles
• https://github.com/webpro/awesome-dotfiles
• https://github.com/webpro/dotfiles
• https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles

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© 2021 Mike North