Thomas’s dotfiles

With many thanks to Mathias Bynens

Installation

Warning: If you want to give these dotfiles a try, you should first fork this repository, review the code, and remove things you don't want or need. Don't blindly use my settings unless you know what that entails. Use at your own risk!

Manual Installation

You can clone the repository wherever you want. (I like to keep it in ~/git/dotfiles, with ~/dotfiles as a symlink.)

mkdir -p ~/git
cd ~/git
git clone https://github.com/tuxpeople/dotfiles.git
cd dotfiles

Then manually symlink or copy the files you need to your home directory. For example:

ln -s ~/git/dotfiles/.bashrc ~/.bashrc
ln -s ~/git/dotfiles/.bash_profile ~/.bash_profile
ln -s ~/git/dotfiles/.gitconfig ~/.gitconfig
# ... and so on for other files you want to use

Automated Installation with Ansible

For automated deployment, I use Ansible with the geerlingguy.dotfiles role. This is my preferred method for setting up new machines.

Specify the $PATH

If ~/.path exists, it will be sourced along with the other files, before any feature testing (such as detecting which version of ls is being used) takes place.

Here’s an example ~/.path file that adds /usr/local/bin to the $PATH:

export PATH="/usr/local/bin:$PATH"

Add custom commands without creating a new fork

If ~/.extra exists, it will be sourced along with the other files. You can use this to add a few custom commands without the need to fork this entire repository, or to add commands you don’t want to commit to a public repository.

My ~/.extra looks something like this:

# Git credentials
# Not in the repository, to prevent people from accidentally committing under my name
GIT_AUTHOR_NAME="Thomas Deutsch"
GIT_COMMITTER_NAME="$GIT_AUTHOR_NAME"
git config --global user.name "$GIT_AUTHOR_NAME"
GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="[email protected]"
GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL="$GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL"
git config --global user.email "$GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL"

You could also use ~/.extra to override settings, functions and aliases from my dotfiles repository. It’s probably better to fork this repository instead, though.

Sensible macOS defaults

When setting up a new Mac, you may want to set some sensible macOS defaults:

~/.macos

Install Homebrew formulae

When setting up a new Mac, you may want to install Homebrew and your preferred formulae. Some functionality in these dotfiles depends on certain packages being installed:

• Git completion: These dotfiles use the Homebrew version of Git with enhanced completion
• direnv: For directory-based environment variables (see .bash_profile:89)
• mise: Modern replacement for asdf version manager (see .bash_profile:93)
• pyenv: Python version management (see .bash_profile:97)

Thanks to…

• @ptb and his macOS Setup repository
• Ben Alman and his dotfiles repository
• Cătălin Mariș and his dotfiles repository
• Gianni Chiappetta for sharing his amazing collection of dotfiles
• Jan Moesen and his ancient .bash_profile + shiny tilde repository
• Lauri ‘Lri’ Ranta for sharing loads of hidden preferences
• Matijs Brinkhuis and his dotfiles repository
• Nicolas Gallagher and his dotfiles repository
• Sindre Sorhus
• Tom Ryder and his dotfiles repository
• Kevin Suttle and his dotfiles repository and macOS-Defaults project, which aims to provide better documentation for ~/.macos
• Haralan Dobrev
• Anyone who contributed a patch or made a helpful suggestion