Personal repository of dotfiles. This is for those settings that migrate well from machine to machine and that I consider safe to publish. You’re welcome to use them, but you’ll probably want to fork it to remove anything peculiar to me or my setup that I’ve left in here.
$ git clone git://github.com/tejr/dotfiles.git ~/.dotfiles
It’s more likely you’ll want to read the configuration files and find snippets relevant to your particular workflow.
There’s an installation script, but it’s pretty bare-bones, so don’t run it without reading it first. You’ll need to have a recent enough version of Git to support submodules for this to work.
$ ~/.dotfiles/install
The script will prompt you about replacing old files. If you’re brave/insane,
you can pipe yes(1)
into it to accept all the replacements:
$ yes | ~/.dotfiles/install
Configuration is included for:
- ack — Perl alternative to
grep(1)
, including a copy of its standalone version - awesome — Tiling window manager
- Bash — GNU Bourne-Again Shell, including a
~/.profile
configured to work with most Bourne-compatible shells - cURL — Command-line tool for transferring data with URL syntax
- Git — Distributed version control system
- GnuPG — GNU Privacy Guard, for private communication and file encryption
- Mutt — Terminal mail user agent
- Newsbeuter — Terminal RSS/Atom feed reader
- Perl::Critic — Static analysis tool for Perl code
- Readline — GNU library for user input used by Bash, MySQL, and others
- Taskwarrior — Command-line task list manager
- tmux — Terminal multiplexer similar to GNU Screen
- rxvt-unicode — Fork of the rxvt terminal emulator with Unicode support
- Vim — Vi IMproved, a text editor
- X11 — Windowing system with network transparency for Unix
The configurations for Bash, Mutt, tmux, and Vim are the most expansive and most likely to be of interest. The rest of the configurations are relatively minimal changes to defaults that annoyed me.
My .profile
and other files in sh
are written in Bourne/POSIX shell script
so that they can be parsed by any Bourne-compatible shell, including the dash
shell used as the system shell on modern Debian-derived systems. Individual
scripts called by .profile
are saved in .profile.d
and iterated on login
for ease of management. All of these boil down to exporting variables
appropriate to the system and the software it has available.
My interactive and scripting shell of choice is Bash; as a GNU/Linux admin who ends up installing Bash on BSD machines anyway, I very rarely have to write Bourne-compatible scripts.
My .bash_profile
calls .profile
for variable exports, and then runs
.bashrc
for interactive shells. Subscripts are kept in .bashrc.d
, and all
are loaded for the creation of any new interactive shell. The contents of this
directory changes all the time depending on the host, and only specific scripts
in it are versioned; the rest are ignored by .gitignore
.
As I occasionally have work on very old internal systems, my Bash is written to
work with any version 2.05a or newer. This is the version in which the
less error-prone [[
test syntax was introduced. This is why I use older
syntax for certain things such as appending items to arrays:
array=("${array[@]}" "$item")
Compare this to the much nicer syntax available since 3.1-alpha1, which actually works for arrays with sparse indexes, unlike the above syntax:
array+=("$item")
My prompt generally looks like this, colored bright green:
[user@hostname:~]$
It expands based on context to include these elements in this order:
- Whether in a Git, Mercurial, or Subversion repository, and punctuation to show whether there are local modifications at a glance
- The number of running background jobs
- The exit status of the last command, if non-zero
With all of the above (a rare situation), it might look something like this:
[user@hostname:~/gitrepo](git:master?){1}<127>$
This is all managed within the prompt
function. Some of the Git stuff was
adapted from @necolas’ superb dotfiles.
When I use any other Bourne-compatible shell, I’m generally happy to accept its defaults for interactive behavior.
My mail is kept in individual Maildirs under ~/Mail
, with inbox
being where
most unfiltered mail is sent. I use Getmail, Procmail, and
MSMTP; the configurations for these are not included here. I make heavy
use of GnuPG for email—everything is signed by default, and I encrypt whenever
I have a public key available for the recipient. The GnuPG interfacing is done
with GPGme, rather than defining commands for each crypto operation. I
wrote an article about this setup if it sounds appealing.
These are just generally vi-friendly settings, not much out of the ordinary. Note that the configuration presently uses a hard-coded 256-color colorscheme, and uses subshells rather than login shells, with an attempt to control the environment to stop shells thinking they have access to an X display—I’m forced to use PuTTY a lot at work, and I don’t like Xming very much.
The configuration for Bash includes a tmux
function designed to make attach
into the default command if no arguments are given and sessions do already
exist. The default command is normally new-session
.
The majority of the .vimrc
file is just setting options, with a few mappings.
I try not to deviate too much from the Vim defaults behaviour in terms of
interactive behavior and keybindings.
The configuration is extensively commented, mostly because I was reading through it one day and realised I’d forgotten what half of it did. Plugins are loaded using @tpope’s pathogen.vim.
Public domain. It’s just configuration, do whatever you like with it if any of it’s useful to you. If you’re feeling generous, you could always buy me a beer next time you’re in New Zealand.