This repository contains the home directory dotfiles and customizations
of Brandon Rhodes. You might also be interested in taking a look at his
version controlled .emacs.d directory at:
https://github.com/brandon-rhodes/dot-emacs
When I am setting up a shell account on a new machine, I check this
homedir repository out into my new home directory and set it up like
this (omitting the "ubuntu" step if I am on another operating system):
$ cd
$ git co https://github.com/brandon-rhodes/homedir.git
$ mv homedir/.[Xa-z]* homedir/* .
$ rmdir homedir
$ bin/,setup-ubuntu
$ bin/,setup-home-usr
$ bin/,setup-zsh
I carefully log in using ssh in another terminal window — to make sure
that the dotfiles leave me able to connect — and then change my default
shell to /bin/zsh with chsh and am off and running.
Note that my Emacs configuration is kept in a separate repository:
https://github.com/brandon-rhodes/dot-emacs
Note that most custom commands in ~/bin have names that start with a
comma, to keep them orthogonal from real commands and prevent future
name collisions with any new binaries that might come along in the Unix
world. Plus, I can press comma-Tab in my shell and see a list of all of
the scripts, in case I have forgotten the name of one of them.
For years I kept the contents of my version-controlled home directory
dotfiles a closely-guarded secret. Which was probably not a bad idea.
At the time, my shell scripts and dotfiles did contain quite a few hints
about how I secured the various connections that I could make between
all of the systems to which I had access at Georgia Tech. But over the
last decade my digital life has become streamlined, simplified, and far
more standard — I now get to use ssh for every single off-machine
connection that I make!
So when the moment came last week that I wanted to create a shell
account on my wife's desktop Mac, I looked over the files that I was
about to check out into ~ and realized two things.
First, none of them really contained secrets any more, or at least could be easily edited to remove them.
Second, it was a hassle to set up the credentials on the Mac that would make it possible to access the private repository where my dotfiles were hidden away. This had also been a problem when wanting to check out my dotfiles on public machines, like my Webfaction account.
So I decided to make my dotfiles public — I myself will be able to get to them more easily, and anyone else who might be curious can mine them for hints and tidbits of wisdom about smoothing away the rough edges of the Unix environment.
Enjoy, and please consider all of these files to be MIT-licensed: take whatever you can use, and good luck!
— Brandon Rhodes, August 2012