Designed to maintain and use a common set of files across any unix derived system, only actually tested on macOS and Ubuntu. There is no framework, everything is managed by shell scripts. Files are organised by topic, with the zsh topic being the engine so to speak.
Running install.sh primarily does two things:
-
Dynamically manages symbolic links using
ln. Any files within any topic directory suffixed with.linkedwill be symbolically linked from$HOMEin the same file structure, ie.topic/foo/bar.zsh.linkedwill have a symbolic link from$HOME/foo/bar.zsh. Existing files that conflict with linked files will be renamed to have.oldas a suffix, ie.$HOME/foo/bar.zsh.old. -
Runs the topic installation scripts, starting with
zsh. Any script namedinstall.zshwithin the base directory of each topic will be run during installation. These scripts are where you should install applications, write environment variables, write initialisation scripts, etc. Within each topic directory, any file namedinit.zsh(ie.topic/init.zsh) will be sourced first, then all files prefixed with a number (ie.topic/01_config.zsh) will be sourced in alphabetical order within$HOME/.zshrc. This is where you should implement custom configuration that needs to be loaded with each shell instance.
At every step of the way, before making any change it will first be checked if the change needs to be made, so it is safe to repeatedly run the installation process as well as updating and recompiling.
When zsh/install.zsh is executed, the list of plugins (defined within zsh/plugin_repos.zsh as an array of GitHub repositories with format <author>/<name>) will be cloned into the zsh/plugins directory. All *.zsh files are then compiled, and zsh/plugins/init.zsh will be generated sourcing each plugin. All functions within zsh/functions will also be compiled, and zsh/init.zsh will be generated which will add each directory within zsh/functions to fpath and autoload each function.
In $HOME/.zshrc (which is symbolically linked to zsh/.zshrc.linked), every init.zsh within any topic directory is sourced, then every *.zsh file that is prefixed with a number within any topic directory will be sourced in alphabetical order. Within zsh/03_plugins.zsh, the function dotfiles load_plugins is called which sources zsh/plugins/init.zsh. This way, you can control what is loaded before and after plugins are loaded.
Running dotfiles update will pull all plugin repositories as well as the main dotfiles repository. It may be necessary to recompile by running dotfiles recompile which will recompile any files that have changed since they were last compiled. After updating or compiling, you can reload shell by running dotfiles reload to see the effect of any changes.
Running dotfiles benchmark will download the latest version of zsh-bench to the plugins folder and run it.
- romkatv/powerlevel10k: nice theme with good performance
- zimfw/completion: enables tab completion
- zimfw/ssh: for ssh-agent convenience
- zdharma/fast-syntax-highlighting: highly performant syntax highlighting
- zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions: fish-like autosuggestions
The install script for this topic will only run if it is being run within a macOS environment, so you could add all kinds of macOS specific system configuration here without affecting Linux environments which run the same installer.
It will check whether or not Homebrew is installed, and if not, run the installer in non-interactive mode. It will also statically define the required paths in init.zsh so that the brew shellenv script isn't called on every shell load as the installer recommends. It then looks through all topics for a folder brew containing a Brewfile and runs brew bundle install --file=Brewfile.
It will use Homebrew to install the latest version of Python and set aliases for python and pip within init.zsh to point to the brew installed python3 and python3 -m pip. It then updates pip and looks through all topics for a folder pip containing a requirements.txt and runs pip install -r requirements.txt.
It will use Homebrew to install the latest version of zsh and set it to your default shell. On Apple silicon, this will make your zsh use the latest arm64 native build rather than the slightly dated x64 build that ships with macOS by default.
sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ndunnett/dotfiles/master/install.sh)"
On GitHub, navigate to Settings > Codespaces, tick Automatically install dotfiles and populate the repository field.
In VSCode, navigate to Settings > User > Extensions > Dev Containers, and populate Dotfiles: Repository.
Results from benchmarking with zsh-bench on a 2020 M1 MacBook Air:
first_prompt_lag_ms=13.259
first_command_lag_ms=101.214
command_lag_ms=13.800
input_lag_ms=7.491
exit_time_ms=39.214
first_prompt_lag_ms=20.456
first_command_lag_ms=106.819
command_lag_ms=5.379
input_lag_ms=7.171
exit_time_ms=38.615
first_prompt_lag_ms=292.866
first_command_lag_ms=302.503
command_lag_ms=86.253
input_lag_ms=7.472
exit_time_ms=100.290
| Vanilla | ndunnett/dotfiles | Oh-My-Zsh | |
|---|---|---|---|
| first_prompt_lag_ms | 100% | 154% | 2208% |
| first_command_lag_ms | 100% | 106% | 299% |
| command_lag_ms | 100% | 39% | 625% |
| input_lag_ms | 100% | 96% | 100% |
| exit_time_ms | 100% | 98% | 256% |
- Setup font management
- Setup SSH teleportation
- Setup automatic updates
- Enable automating installation with Ansible or similar
- Refine list of plugins to use
- Populate config with more improvements
- Test and patch compatibility with wider range of distributions