DavidCain / dotfiles

Files used to customize my environment

About

This repository contains all of my dotfiles. I use a lot of shortcuts/aliases and a small assortment of Vim plugins. To be productive on a new system, I rely on these customizations.

This repository is dual-purposed. It version controls all of my environment changes, but also contains everything I need in order to get up and running (immediately) on a brand new system.

Vim/Git

I tinker with my Vim & Git settings a good deal, so the configurations for each are tracked as submodules:

• vimfiles
• gitfiles

Installation

1. Configure Homebrew (rcfiles will later be auto-edited)

   /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
   eval "$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)"

2. Install critical system-wide packages

   brew bundle install  # Mac, presumes Homebrew
   sudo apt install \
     neovim \   # (Or Vim)
     tmux

3. Run script:

   ./install.sh

4. Restart shell (or start up Alacritty!)

How installation works

The install script will not remove any existing configuration without backing it up first.

Specifically, any pre-existing dotfiles (that will be replaced by the files tracked in this repository) will be copied to ~/dotfiles_old. Their contents will be committed to a Git repository, so that successive runs of the installation script won't miss any new modifications.

After a file/directory has been successfully backed up, it is replaced with a symlink to its equivalent file within this repository. Any changes within the repository will be reflected immediately upon sourcing dotfiles. Conversely, editing dotfiles directly will give the opportunity to stage any changes and version control them here.

Possibly absent binaries

My rc files are written to minimize assumptions that any given third-party tool is actually available on the system. For instance, vim is assumed to be available (it's assigned to $EDITOR), but node is not presumed to be installed.

Any lines that depend on a third-party executable are generally wrapped in a check to first make sure that the executable is present in $PATH. If absent, the line will silently decline to execute.

For these dotfiles to work best, executables should be installed separately. Referenced tools include (but are not limited to):

• Build tools:
  • cargo
  • poetry
• Miscellaneous tools:
  • direnv
  • fzf
  • ripgrep

Other env vars only make sense if a given tool is installed. For instance HOMEBREW_NO_ANALYTICS only makes sense when Homebrew is installed. These values are harmless if the tool is not present (e.g. Linux systems don't care about brew)