‹ David Crespo

Version your dotfiles

I ran into Gary Bernhardt’s dotfiles1 for the first time around 2015, a few years into my career. His 500 line vimrc and intricate git helpers (which I immediately copied) freaked me out. I thought: wow, I could never make anything like that. How could someone put all this together?

It turns out all you have to do is spend 1,000+ hours programming every year for 10 years. Ok, not really. All you really have to do is put your dotfiles in a git repo. If you make your dotfiles a formal codebase, you will treat them like a codebase: you’ll cultivate and incrementally improve them over time — possibly a very long time. Copy from others, add an alias or a script when an idea strikes you in the moment. Eventually you’ll end up with a nice set of personal tools and tricks.

How I do it

My repo lives in ~/repos/dotfiles. There’s a bash script install.sh in there that symlinks2 a hard-coded list of files into the home dir. That’s the whole thing. When I want to change something, I edit the relevant file and make a commit. If I add a new config file, like when I added a global .gitignore, I add it to install.sh and run the script.3

How to get started

  1. Make a git repo
  2. Copy a dotfile into it, like .gitconfig
  3. Create install.sh in the repo. 
    #! /usr/bin/env bash
ln -sf "$PWD/.gitconfig" "~/.gitconfig"
    This will replace the original file with a symlink to the one in your repo.
  4. chmod +x install.sh to make it executable
  5. Run it with ./install.sh.

Not all config files live in the home directory. VS Code keeps its config somewhere else.4 That’s fine: you can create vscode/settings.json in your repo and symlink it wherever it belongs.

There are lots of tools around like stow or chezmoi for managing the symlinks, but a short bash script is all you need. It’s better to start with a minimal setup you can fully understand and only use fancier tools when you have a reason to.

Put it on GitHub!

This is optional but recommended. It’s great to be able to send someone a GitHub link to show how you did something. Be careful not to push anything secret, like API keys.

Footnotes

  1. In Unix OSs, dotfiles are those config files and directories like .gitconfig, .vimrc, .zprofile in your home directory that start with . to make them hidden. Many apps now put their config files inside ~/.config/ to reduce clutter. Other config files may not start with a dot, but they’re often called dotfiles anyway. ↩

  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_link ↩

  3. I can run install.sh over and over because symlinking the same files again doesn’t do anything. ↩

  4. https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/settings#_settings-file-locations ↩