dotfiles store your personal system settings. These are mine. When compared to Windows' broken registry, dotfiles are bliss.
I mainly use vim, gvim and Git on Cygwin with zsh as my favorite shell. It might be a very special setup, you've been warned.
git clone [email protected]:agross/dotfiles.git <somewhere>
cd <somewhere>
rake install
The install rake task will symlink the appropriate files in <somewhere> to your Cygwin and Windows home directories. You will be asked for the password of an administrative user when the first symlink is created (see next section).
rake install will not delete existing files automatically; it will ask you for permission to overwrite files. You can run rake install as often as you like, for example after you added new dotfiles.
You can configure some settings in config.yml:
admin: <%= ENV['USERDOMAIN'] %>\Administrator
profiles:
cygwin: C:\Cygwin\home\<%= ENV['USERNAME'] %>
windows: <%= ENV['USERPROFILE'] %>
You will be asked for the password of the admin user when the first symlink is created. Why? The problem on Windows is that symlinks cannot be created by normal users. psexec.exe is used to launch a process that does the symlinking with (hopefully) sufficient administrative permissions.
profiles.cygwin and profiles.windows denote the respective home directories of the subsystems. The subfolders of <repository>/profiles/cygwin and <repository>/profiles/windows directly refer to these configuration entries. The contents of the special <repository>/profiles/all folder will be symlinked to all profiles. If you want a third profile entry, just create a new entry in config.yml and add a matching folder under <repository>/profiles.
This work, especially the rakefile, is based on the dotfiles of Ryan Bates and Zach Holman.