dotfiles

Usage

make                # Compile dotfiles
make diff           # Diff new dotfiles against the existing ones
make noact          # Show the commands make install will perform
make install        # Install the dotfiles from the repository

Motivation and Features

I wanted to put my dotfiles in git for awhile, but I couldn't find a dotfile manager that supported all of the features I wanted. By implementing inline Perl scripting, I enable these features:

• Environment-aware. Sometimes configuration files have to take the local environment into account. For example, there are several options I would like to enable in my .nanorc. However, they were introduced in nano 2.1, which is not available everywhere, and nano complains when it encounters an option it doesn't recognize. So I need my nanorc to automatically adapt to the available version of nano.

• Organizable. Some configuration files (.bashrc, .emacs) can get very long and complicated. I would like a way to organize the contents of my dotfiles. For example, rather than having all of my environment variables in bash_profile, I would like to split them into multiple files by topic: perl/perl5lib.bash_profile, private/secret-env.bash_profile, and so on. This allows me to easily add or remove features from my configuration. This means I need to be able to assemble my dotfiles out of components, somewhat like run-parts.

• Cooperative. Sometimes I want to part of a dotfile in git and the rest of it configured independently. For example, my .xscreensaver file has a painstakingly configured list of screenhacks, which I would like to use everywhere. However, other settings, like timeouts and power management, I want to adjust using xscreensaver-demo. The inline scripting capability allows the new version of the configuration file to composed based on the installed version.

• Universal. Many dotfile managers are written in Ruby or Python. Some of my computers don't have Ruby, and some are still running Python 2.4. But you can always rely on a modern version of Perl.

So I wrote a preprocessor (I'm currently calling it QUPP, for no very good reason) that allows inline Perl code in arbitrary files. It's a similar concept to PHP, but it uses Perl instead of something else. This capability enables all of the above features and more. Combined with a little script to compile, diff, and install new versions of the dotfiles, I think I have developed a reasonably powerful system personalization utility. All of this code can be found in the lib/ subdirectory.

License

See individual files; this repository includes files covered by a variety of licenses.