Dotfiles

Current Version : pre-release
Last Update     : 2021-07-14

No major mystery here, just a bunch of files to quickly get up and running in a new environment or when reinstalling software. Also, I suppose, handy if I have to restore my settings to my own personal defaults or something like that.

While several of the files in this directory are platform agnostic, the local environment that they come from is a macOS installation, so no guarantees can be made for compatibility across platforms. Also, several files in this repo will contain my name and/or e-mail address, so people other than me should not expect this repository to just "plug-and-play".

I am making this repository public for two reasons:

1. So that people can get inspiration for their own repositories.
2. So that people can find errors, potential improvements and suggest tweaks.

If you have a thought, comment or idea regarding the dotfiles in this repo, please open an issue first so that we can discuss the change. If I like what I hear, I might implement the change myself or request a pull request.

Ideas For Future Development

Since first creating this repo and the system for maintaining a collection of files scattered around the filesystem in a single repository, I have discovered a number of alternatives to this, with my favorite by far being (chezmoi)[https://www.chezmoi.io/].

For that reason, I am currently evaluating chezmoi, as I am considering replacing my current system with it or working out some kind of system that integrates my current system and chezmoi in some way. For that reason, I will not be making any considerable changes to this repository until I decide on a proper way forward.

Opinionated

As Dotfiles are a collection of personalized settings, tweaks and adjustments, it's only fair to be open and honest about the kinds of things that this repo "believes", for lack of a better word. If you disagree with more than one or two of the points below, you might not find much use from the various dotfiles in this repository.

• Fish shell is superior to the alternatives.
• Despite its issues, iTerm2 remains the best macOS terminal emulator.
• Dark backgrounds with light text are preferable to the alternative.
• Color and font weight should be consistent, have a clear meaning and never be used haphazardly.
• Information should be easy to access quickly, but not thrown in your face when you don't need it. (Think auto-hiding dock, no icons displayed on the desktop, straight-forward terminal prompts, etc.)
• Often-used commands should be "refactored" into scripts, aliases or functions if a Homebrew package does not exist for it already.
• There's almost never a good reason to ls without the -l flag.
• In most cases, a human-friendly estimate of file sizes is preferable to an exact byte count (so 23K, not 23125).
• While vim, emacs, and all the rest of them have their own set of pros and cons, nano is probably the best text editor available in a terminal.

The Method to the Madness

It is recommended that the scripts folder be added to your path so that the script there will be available globally. It is used to add new files to the dotfile repository, a process that will be described further down.

Note that this script should not be moved to another directory that is already in your path, as its relative position to the repository root is used to determine where to store the actual dotfiles.

TODO / Backlog

• Figure out a good way for the script to respect the .env file. Especially if this can be done without any external dependencies. This is so that I can include dotfiles with secrets without posting the secret to GitHub.
• Figure out a good way to store the original path of a file so that the symantic links can be restored easily if broken.
  • This can be done in a better way than the current implementation.
• Create additional script for replacing a file with the version from the dotfile repository, for scenarios where a dotfile exists in the repository for software that has not been installed previously.
• Figure out a good way to include global Composer and NPM packages in the dotfile repository. A listing is enough, but I don't want to be adding the global packages.json file to the repo either...
• Explore different ways to use brew in a dotfile repository.
• Rebuild the osx script from scratch to be up to date with the latest version of macOS.
• Explore the limitation macOS has (had?) regarding symlinked files not always working as intended in sandboxed applications.