My development environment configuration

My configuration files for my development environment. Inspired by everyone else's dotfiles and especially thoughtbot's approach.¹ I don't need their entire setup, but the basic approach is the right one: sync .rc files in ~/ with a repo you control via symlinks.

Prerequisites

• Install Homebrew

Included

Zsh configuration

I loved oh my zsh, but wanted to keep things light and try rolling my own setup. It includes:

• Plugins: autojump, zsh-autosuggestions, zsh-history-substring-search, zsh-syntax-highlighting
• various aliases and a few functions with completions
• starship prompt & export of my terminal theme (based on Github Dark/Light vscode themes)²:

Dark	Light

This setup could be more optimized - zsh is complex, and I'm no expert. I will try to get some time for it, but it works, it works fast, and I want to build other things at the moment.

home/.zshrc is the main configuration file, which imports more config from the zsh/ directory.

Global packages

• Homebrew (see Brewfile)
• Ruby (see home/.default-gems)

Language version management

• Mise-en-place version manager (Ruby & Node.js mainly, but will handle other languages)

Dotfiles

Various dotfiles are in home/ and config/.

Installation

Take this and modify as you like. Currently, it requires the repo directory to be ~/.dotfiles.³ It will set up symlinks in ~/ pointing to the files in ~/.dotfiles/home/ and symlinks in ~/.config/ pointing to the files in ~/.dotfiles/config/.

You will need to modify scripts if you want to use a different directory/structure.

Bundle the Brewfile

Installs all packages/plugins.

brew bundle

Tracking a new configuration file

You have an untracked .somerc file that you want to bring into your configs.

scripts/home_to_dotfiles.sh .somerc

This moves the file(s) to ~/.dotfiles/home/ and symlinks to them from ~/. It accepts multiple files (space-separated).

Symlinking your files

You have a new machine, or want to make sure things are sync'd up:

scripts/link_dotfiles.sh

This will create a symlink in ~/ for any files in ~/.dotfiles/home/.

To create symlinks for the files in /config/ (with same directory structure), run:

scripts/link_dot_config_files.sh

Things I haven't been able to automate (yet)

• Maccy Clipboard Manager One copied item is simply not enough.

Footnotes

# trailing slash is important
cp -RL path/to/directory/ ~.dotfiles
rm -rf path/to/directory

Footnotes

1. I tried to get thoughtbot's rcm to work for me without cloning their repo, but ran into some issues. In particular, I wanted to keep the repo root directory clean and store files in a home/ directory (as rc files are in ~/). I could not get the .rcrc DOTFILES_DIRS environment variable to work for all of the operations. ↩

2. You can grab a vscode theme's ansi colors by running "Developer: Generate Color Theme From Current Settings" from the command palette (terminal.ansi.[ansiColor] settings). ↩

3. If you accidentally put it elsewhere, you can safely move a git directory with: ↩