Dotfiles

The usage of dotfiles is quite common with programmers. For a long time, I used other people’s dotfiles - Zach Holman from Github, Ryan Bates from Railscasts, and a couple others.

These worked pretty well, and my only complaint with them was my relative lack of understanding how they worked. Everyone’s setup is different, and although other people’s dotfiles (which are quite popular - both Zach and Ryan’s average 1500+ stars and 500+ forks on Github) can help me get to a better workflow, I began to feel like setting up my own workflow might be a better solution.

Partially this was because when I originally forked their dotfiles, I didn’t feel experienced enough to have an opinion on things. My choice of a shell, for instance, would be dictated by whichever the dotfiles I was using preferred.

So I rolled my own dotfiles. I thought I would take some time to document my dotfiles, though anything deeper than a high-level overview could become woefully out of date, so I’ll keep it brief:

My software choices are pretty simple and standard for a Mac user. Homebrew for compiling and installing most software. After that, ZSH, Vim, and tmux.

I wrote about tmux in a post at the beginning of the year, though that setup relied a bit on extraneous features using tmux-powerline - did I really need to see the weather in my tmux bar if I could just look out the damn window? I decided to roll my own tmux.conf and have it be refreshingly minimal.

Of note in the tmux.conf is a single ‘powerline’-esque feature: the output of a now playing script and the date/time. Date and time is obvious, and my now playing script is important as I often listen to internet radio and would like to know what song is playing. I wrote about the implementation of this script in “Now Playing Script”.

I use ZSH, as I’m quite fond of the tab completion and I think oh-my-zsh is a pretty great tool for tricking your command-line prompt. I use the ‘kennethreitz’ theme.

My vim setup requires a bit more writing, though I plan to expand that into a later post. For now, my vimrc explains my usage patterns and by using Vundle and :BundleInstall, you can get a setup fairly similar to mine.

Other miscellaneous things worth mentioning:

I alias less as vim -u ~/.vimrc.more, which is a read-only vim configuration with keys similar to less. It supports syntax highlighting, which was the primary reason for my switch.

I’m a huge fan of aliases - anything over three characters should be aliased, in my opinion. You can see my continually growing list of aliases in this file.

I’ve begun writing more shell functions, which has been a lot of fun to learn. The file is here. Here’s a couple I’ve been writing recently:

• c: cd and ls so I can keep track of where I am.
• f: I always forget how to use ack, so this function simply searches with ack using specified arguments. This should really be replaced by me just knowing ack syntax.
• t: A function for running Rails tests - if script/test exists, run the standard Rails tests, otherwise, run rspec.
• mux: This one is pretty interesting and I use it all the time: it searches for an existing tmux session and asks if you’d like to join it; if not, it starts a new one for you. This isn’t really that big of a deal, but it’s handy to keep tabs on all the tmux sessions I have open, as I often unintentionally duplicate.
• post and fpost: these two are for my work on this site! post creates a new time-formatted markdown post with my argument as the name (I’m lazy), and fpost searches through existing posts, opening the correct one based on the keyword provided. After fifteen posts or so, navigating a directory of markdown files titled “2012-01-01…, 2012-01-02… etc.” gets pretty tedious.

As for the dotfiles itself, I use a custom ruby script called [go-time] to symlink my dotfiles over, skipping them if they already exist. It’s a small thing, but not writing the dotfiles as hidden files makes things a lot easier. It’s pretty simple to work with invisible files in vim, but for Sublime Text and other GUI text editors, it can get a little tedious.