t-mart / dotfiles

My dotfiles

dotfiles

These are my dotfiles.

How it works

The basic idea is to:

• Use a bare repository, which lets us put the usual .git directory somewhere else. If we used a non-bare repository, git would create $HOME/.git, which would cause any git command run in a path under the home directory to erroneously believe it was in a repository (git commands traverse the file path hierarchy to find this directory).
• In our shell, alias dfgit to a specially-flavored invocation of git that is uses this bare repository.

This system is heavily inspired by https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/dotfiles.

Installing onto a new system

1. Install git (and private keys, etc)

2. Clone

   git clone --bare [e-mail]:t-mart/dotfiles.git "$HOME/.dotfile_config"

3. Checkout out the dotfiles

   This gnarly command only needs to be used once on a fresh machine. After checkout, we'll use a shell alias.

   git --git-dir="$HOME/.dotfile_config/" --work-tree="$HOME" checkout

   This step might fail because the checkout might doesn't want to overwrite files that already exist. So, delete the ones listed or back them up somewhere. Rerun the command until it succeeds.

4. Windows-specific setup

   Some stuff that windows in particular needs:

   • Junction some files/directories. This lets us place config files for applications that wouldn't be looking to where this repository places them (for example, .AppData).
   • Create the Windows-specific git config file

   To do all that, run the following in powershell:

   .\.config\link.ps1

5. Create a new shell

   So that way, the dotfiles take effect and load the dfgit alias of our various shells. dfgit can now be used for all interactions with the dotfile repository.

6. Hide untracked files

   This ensures that dfgit status doesn't show us a ton of files that we're not interested in. (Conversely, you will not be notified of a new file that you may want to commit, so remember to explicitly add them.)

   dfgit config --local status.showUntrackedFiles no

Adding/commiting/pushing/pulling/etc

Just pretend that dfgit = git, and interact like normal.

# examples
dfgit add .config/foo
dfgit commit -m "Add foo"
dfgit push
dfgit pull

PRO TIP: If you are simply updating/deleting files git already knows about, use dfgit commit -a -m <message> to commit only changed files (not untracked files)

dfgit for New Shells

If configuring a new shell, an alias/mapping/function/etc should be configured so that running:

dfgit <...other args>

is the same as

git --git-dir="$HOME/.dotfile_config/" --work-tree="$HOME" <...other args>

Use your shells documentation to achieve that.

Starting from scratch

You won't need to run this unless you want to start a whole new repo! This is just to record how this method is initialized.

git init --bare "$HOME/.dotfile_config"