"dotfiles" and system configuration

• Target platforms: OS X and Red Hat-like Linuxes (eg. CentOS).
• Set-up method: Beautiful and intricate snowflake incredibly over-engineered Ansible orchestration.
• Visible in the screenshot:
  • Tomorrow (dark) color scheme.
  • Adobe Source Code Pro (Light) font.
  • Vim, running inside tmux, inside iTerm2, on OS X "El Capitan".

Features

Dotfiles

A set of dotfiles that I've been tweaking and twiddling since the early 2000s (under version control since 2009). Characteristics include:

• Sane Vim pasting via bracketed paste mode.
• Write access to local clipboard from local and remote hosts, inside and outside of tmux (via Clipper).
• Full mouse support (pane/split resizing, scrolling, text selection) in Vim and tmux.
• Focus/lost events for Vim inside tmux.
• Cursor shape toggles on entering Vim.
• Italics in the terminal.
• Bundles a (not-excessive) number of useful Vim plug-ins.
• Conservative Vim configuration (very few overrides of core functionality; most changes are unobtrusive enhancements; some additional functionality exposed via <Leader> and <LocalLeader> mappings.
• Relatively restrained Zsh config, Bash-like but with a few Zsh perks, such as right-side prompt, auto-cd hooks, command elapsed time printing and such.
• Unified color-handling (across iTerm2 and Vim) via Base16 Shell.
• Encrypted versioning of files with sensitive content (via git-cipher).
• Comprehensive Hammerspoon config.

Homebrew

On OS X, the homebrew role installs a bunch of useful software.

Keyboard customization

On OS X, the keyboard role uses Karabiner to:

• Make Caps Lock serve as Backspace (when tapped), repeated Backspace (when pressed and held), and Left Control (when chorded with another key).
• Make Return serve as Return (when tapped), repeated Return (when pressed and held), and Right Control (when chorded with another key).
• Turn Caps Lock on by tapping both Shift keys simultaneously (turn it off by tapping either Shift key on its own).
• Adds a "SpaceFN" layer that can be activated by holding down Space while hitting other keys; I use this to make the cursor keys available on or near the home row in any app.
• Make the YubiKey work with the Colemak keyboard layout.
• Makes the function keys on my external Realforce keyboard behave like the "media" keys on Apple's keyboards. F13 serves as a sticky "fn" key, and F15 as Power.

Dependencies

• tmux 2.2 or later.
• Vim 7.4 or later with Ruby and Python support (although there's a reasonable amount of feature detection in order to degrade gracefully).
• Relatively recent Zsh.
• Relatively recent Git.
• Clipper for transparent access to the local system clipboard.
• On OS X, iTerm2.
• Python to perform setup via the included install command.

Installation

Clone

git clone --recursive https://github.com/wincent/wincent.git

Note that if you're behind a firewall you may need to set up a temporary ~/.gitconfig with appropriate proxy configuration with a format such as:

[http]
	proxy = fwdproxy:8080

Install

./install        # installs everything on the local machine
./install --help # info on installing specific roles, force-installing etc

This sets up a local Python environment using the bundled virtualenv, bootstraps Ansible, and then uses Ansible to copy the dotfiles and configure the machine.

As a fallback strategy, in case the install script fails, you can symlink the dotfiles by hand with a command like the following:

for DOTFILE in $(find roles/dotfiles/files -maxdepth 1 -name '.*' | tail -n +2); do
  ln -sf $PWD/$DOTFILE ~
done

Note: The ln -sf command will overwrite existing files, but will fail to overwrite existing directories.