.dotfiles

These are my personal dotfiles for configuring the development environment on my personal computers.

It contains configurations for the following operating systems at the moment:

• macOS
• Windows

Philosophy

I believe in keeping things as simple as possible. I have been down the path of over-configuration and I personally find it to be too brittle and difficult to maintain over time.

I generally prefer to stick to so-called "default" programs for my development workflow as much as possible - and with computing in general. This probably deserves its own spiel somewhere 😜 In short, this paradigm has less configuration hurdles / uncanny valley, and generally has more community buzz for issues.

It is preferrable to use cross-platform programs as much as possible, to ensure a consistent experience (and somewhat consistent configuration experience!) across operating systems. This has many benefits, but the one I like the most is that it's portable.

Structure

The dotfiles are structured in a way that each operating system has its own directory. Each directory contains the necessary configuration files and scripts to set up the environment and filenames should be self-explanatory. Comments are included in the files to call out any important details.

dotfiles/
├── macos/
│   ├── .zshenv
│   ├── .zprofile
│   ├── .zshrc
│   └── setup.sh # Contains a script intended to be run in a terminal. It can simply be copy/pasted.
├── windows/
│   ├── Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1
│   └── setup.ps1 # Contains a script intended to be run in a PowerShell terminal. It can simply be copy/pasted.

Notable Programs

Here are programs that I use in my development workflow, and others I feel are notable.

Development

• proto: On both macOS and Windows, used to manage dev tools (mainly node, pnpm, bun, etc.).

  • Other good cross-platform version management tools: fnm, pnpm, volta.
  • I prefer this to fnm generates folders on every terminal session, which I find a bit annoying. Also, proto doesn't install npm by default when installing node, which I prefer.
  • This tool still has some rough edges (e.g., I have some weird behavior with Zed) but it is otherwise excellent.

• Defaults, Defaults, Defaults:

  • Terminal: Terminal.app on macOS, Terminal on Windows 11.

  • Shell: zsh on macOS, latest PowerShell on Windows 11.

• Editor: VS Code on both macOS and Windows. Shoutout to Zed. Other notable mention Cursor, although I find Copilot sufficient for my needs.

• Browsers: Safari, Edge, Chrome, and Firefox. Chromium-based is generally preferred for development, but Safari and Firefox have their uses for testing stricter (broken?) web standards.

Others

• winget (shipped with Windows): Very convenient package manager for Windows that also updates other programs on my system automically.

• brew: The de facto package manager for macOS. I use it to install most of my CLI tools.

• Raycast: Could potentially be great if they also released a Windows version - would really make both my macOS and Windows experience more consistent.