edwinbalani's dotfiles

Contents

• Introduction
• Licence
• Recommended programs
• Installation
  • Requirements
  • One line to install
• Technical information
  • Directory structure
  • Rationale
  • How it works

Introduction

Congratulations if you've found these. Note that they're mainly for my own use, and thus have some opinionated personalisations that I find useful.

You could use these dotfiles as-is, if you want to, but certain things will be very unhelpful to you (like my .gitconfig). They also come with no warranty or guarantee of quality. (If your computer catches fire, becomes sentient or otherwise ruins your life as a result of using these dotfiles, then it's not my fault. Do let me know if that happens though, because if my measly dotfiles caused that to happen then it would be really cool.)

If you have any suggestions on how these could be improved, please do open an issue or (better) fork, tweak, and submit a pull request.

Licence

MIT License.

Recommended programs

To make the most of these dotfiles, it is highly recommended that you install these programs (and in parenthesis is why):

• zsh + antidote plugin manager
• vim (and optionally gvim if you're in a graphical environment)
• tmux (helpful alias att and tls, and .tmux.conf)

A few that are more optional:

• thefuck (you can use either fuck, oops (SFW) or double-Esc to invoke this)
• both fortune and cowsay (a nice shell startup message ;) )

(If you're not a fan of any of these programs, you're probably in the wrong place. These dotfiles are mainly for my own use, are customised for myself above anything else.)

Installation

Requirements

• git to keep the repository updated (and, er, to clone it in the first place)
• bash for the install script

One line to install

$ git clone https://github.com/edwinbalani/dotfiles.git ~/dotfiles && ~/dotfiles/install.sh

WARNING: You should make a backup of any existing dotfiles before you run this. In many cases, you won't have any, or they'll be system defaults that you don't care about (if you're installing this onto a fresh computer or account).

The installation script is tried and tested heavily on 'full-fat' desktop and server installations of Debian (or Raspbian) stretch and buster and Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04 -- other Linux distros less so. I don't expect it to work on BSD/macOS systems, but you may get lucky.

If you run into a bug with the script on your setup, and have fixed it, submit a pull request so I can merge the changes back in!

Technical information

Read this section if you're interested in how these dotfiles install themselves on your computer, or if you're thinking of hacking on them. It's not mandatory, though; you can just run install.sh and be happy.

Directory structure

• config/: contains 'singleton' files to be symlinked directly into $HOME (e.g. .gitconfig, .tmux.conf)

• install/: contains the installation scripts for the dotfiles. They're broken up into multiple files, each of which serves to install a certain 'component'.

  Many of the components are dependent on the installation of a particular program, e.g. vim or zsh. The installation process automatically detects the presence of these, and skips installation of dependent components if they aren't present.

• vim/: contains dotfiles relevant to vim. These are only installed if vim is detected. If you have gvim, a couple of bonus files get installed too (.gvimrc and the darktooth.vim colour scheme).

• zsh/: contains zshrc, and other files that are sourced from within the main zshrc file. These are only installed if zsh is installed and available as a login shell on your system (we check /etc/shells to do this). ~/.zshrc is overwritten (see below) as a symlink to dotfiles/zsh/zshrc.

Rationale

To an extent, uninstallation of these dotfiles should be easy: the installation is designed to fail or skip a step if it detects a file/directory that already exists, rather than overwriting anything. Most configuration files are symlinked rather than being copied into the filesystem, meaning that you can remove the symlinks and return your system to the state pre-dotfiles.

There are exceptions to this, however: these include (but are not necessarily limited to) .zshrc, .vimrc, .gvimrc, .gitignore, .gitconfig and .tmux.conf, all of which are installed in your home directory. If these files already exist, they will be overwritten. This is because the main use case for these dotfiles is to customise a fresh system, like a new VM, so the existing content of these files is considered unimportant.

How it works

The 'master' installation script is located in install.sh, and this sources the other files under install/ after attempting to update the dotfiles.

The installation process is designed to be unattended, so that you can set it going and enjoy your coffee/tea/other beverage. For this same reason, if you have zsh installed and want to use the zsh environment that gets set up, you need to manually chsh your shell to /bin/zsh or /usr/bin/zsh (depending on where zsh gets installed -- use which zsh to check). This command can sometimes require entry of your login password as a security measure, which would make the installation process non-unattended if chsh were called!

(The longest part of the installation is probably the downloading of Vim plugins, so if your internet speed is slow then you may wish to cut down on how many plugins are downloaded, or run :PluginUpdate yourself later on. Edit vim/.vimrc and install/vim.sh before running install.sh.)