jgillman's sepcial dotfiles

Shoutout

The real core of these dotfiles are from holman's dotfiles. I had been holding off using GitHub for my dotfiles simply because I wasn't aware of a good way of automatically symlinking them and keeping them organized. holman's use of topic folders and a Rakefile to automate symlinking has made it too easy not to. All credit goes to him.

dotfiles

Dotfiles essentially what makes your environment yours. All your unique little tweaks and settings that make your computer completely unusable and foreign to others. I had originally kept all my dotfiles in Dropbox which worked really nicely for a long time. Two big issues I had with my Dropbox setup is that 1) I would manually have to symlink new files/folder and 2) I couldn't use them on remote development machines (where I often work).

Also, to steal directly from holman:

I was a little tired of having long alias files and everything strewn about (which is extremely common on other dotfiles projects, too). That led to this project being much more topic-centric. I realized I could split a lot of things up into the main areas I used (Ruby, git, system libraries, and so on), so I structured the project accordingly.

If you're interested in the philosophy behind why projects like these are awesome, you might want to read my post on the subject.

install

• git clone git@github.com:jgillman/dotfiles.git ~/.dotfiles
• cd ~/.dotfiles
• rake install

The install rake task will symlink the appropriate files in .dotfiles to your home directory. Everything is configured and tweaked within ~/.dotfiles, though.

topical

Everything's built around topic areas. If you're adding a new area to your forked dotfiles — say, "Java" — you can simply add a java directory and put files in there. Anything with an extension of .zsh will get automatically included into your shell. Anything with an extension of .symlink will get symlinked without extension into $HOME when you run rake install.

components

There's a few special files in the hierarchy.

• bin/: Anything in bin/ will get added to your $PATH and be made available everywhere.
• topic/*.zsh: Any files ending in .zsh get loaded into your environment.
• topic/*.symlink: Any files ending in *.symlink get symlinked into your $HOME. This is so you can keep all of those versioned in your dotfiles but still keep those autoloaded files in your home directory. These get symlinked in when you run rake install.
• topic/*.completion.sh: Any files ending in completion.sh get loaded last so that they get loaded after we set up zsh autocomplete functions.