dotfiles

These are my personal dot-files and configuration files. In general, I've come to rely a lot less on a bash script for fresh installs as I used to for a couple of reasons:

1. Bloat: I found that I was copying over a lot of files that I didn't need. By the time I do some sort of system reset, the file that I set up years ago is usually full of cruft that I've since deprecated, and so to run it with confidence requires re-writing it anyway.
2. Outdated: The preferred installation mechanisms for things changes -- e.g. for a long time installing Python binaries directly was the preferred method of setting up Python, but homebrew has, over the years, become much more reliable.

So I now follow a much simpler philosophy:

• Copy over dotfiles, keys, and config files so my configurations are ported over.
• Write down some instructions for setting up the manual things that I know I'll need.

In all, the whole process takes only ~15 minutes, which is generally less than the amount of time it takes to maintain a dedicated shell script.

So where this directory once was fully of shell scripts and a more automated deployment system, it's now just a collection of configuration files and this README, compiling the instructions and sharing my philosophy.

MacOS

Rather than using a shell script and copying over files from this repository, I've found lately that the fastest way to get started with a new machine for mac is to copy over the following directories and files manually:

• ~/.config/
• ~/.hammerspoon/
• ~/.ssh/
• ~/.zshrc/
• ~/.oh-my-zsh/ (optional)
• ~/.tmux.conf
• ~/path/to/misc/keys/

Then install software as needed. In particular, set up:

• Homebrew
• Alacritty
  • By default, my alacritty toml file uses VictorMono Nerd Font Mono, which needs to be downloaded for the system not to fall back to Menlo. For lazy.nvim, you need some sort of nerd font at minimum.
• brew install python3 (note, this comes with pip3, but you'll need to alias pip3 as pip)
• rust
• rust-analyzer and rust-src (or just brew install rust-analyzer so lazy.nvim can detect it)

I otherwise don't keep any static files on disk. I do have an Obsidian vault which I back up to git, so I pull this, then manually connect it to Obsidian.