install and use

• git clone git://github.com/arbales/dotfiles ~/.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.

The main file you'll want to change right off the bat is zsh/zshrc.symlink, which sets up a few paths that'll be different on your particular machine.

You can easily edit the dotfiles with dotmate and easily switch to the directory with dotcd.

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.

what's inside

A lot of stuff. Seriously, a lot of stuff. Check them out in the file browser above and see what components may mesh up with you. Fork it, remove what you don't use, and build on what you do use.

###system

• c is an autocomplete shortcut to your Workspace. For example, c git and then hitting tab will autocomplete to github, and then it simply changes to my github directory. The projects directory is defined in zsh/zshrc.symlink.
• check [filename] is a quick script that tells you whether a domain is available to register.
• smartextract [filename] will extract about a billion different compressed/uncompressed/whatever files and you'll never have to remember the syntax.
• backup is a quick hook into rsync to backup a selection of files. Check out the comments for more details.

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.

add-ons

There are a few things I use to make my life awesome. They're not a required dependency, but if you install them they'll make your life a bit more like a bubble bath.

• If you want some more colors for things like ls, install grc: brew install grc.

thanks

@arbales forked Zach Holman's excellent dotfiles.

@holman forked Ryan Bates' excellent dotfiles for a couple years before the weight of my changes and tweaks inspired me to finally roll my own. But Ryan's dotfiles were an easy way to get into bash customization, and then to jump ship to zsh a bit later. A decent amount of the code in these dotfiles stem or are inspired from Ryan's original project.