dotbot VS dotfiles

Many command line programs keep their configurations somewhere under $HOME. These are often called "dotfiles".

If you ever use more than one machine, likely you'll want the same configuration available on all those machines.. so you'll want some way to copy them to a new machine.

Some dotfile managers are quite simple, like dotbot. https://github.com/anishathalye/dotbot

Home Manager from the Nix community is a bit more sophisticated. It allows for writing configurations in the Nix language, which is nice if you know/like Nix. (Nix is a powerful/expressive package manager. Nix is to apt-get what vim is to notepad).

I started using DotBot a couple of years ago and love it. I store my git repo at ~/.dotfiles, and DotBot handles the symlinking and everything

Dotbot (https://github.com/anishathalye/dotbot) has worked extremely well for me. It’s simple to setup, has minimal dependencies, and it is also easy to run arbitrary commands if I want to get tricky with things. I would highly recommend it.

You might also like something like https://github.com/anishathalye/dotbot. I manage all of the config I care about with this, as part of a repo that also gives me all of the other system setup and customization I expect in my environment.

With dotbot in my GitHub-repository

| for vertical split, - for horizontal split: easy to remember. I have lots of things in my config file, so I don't have an issue with a bit more customization. Installing my .tmux.conf is easy because I use the dotbot dotfile manager.

I use dotbot to manage my dotfiles, which is good for anything I need to install prior to installing plugins (I use vim-plug).

I'm glad you asked! There are plenty of dotfiles managers out there, like chezmoi, Dotbot, or yadm (you can see a list here and a comparison table (from chezmoi, thus biased) here. But for this tutorial (and my dotfiles), I chose dotter.

dotbot is fine.

Yep, I use zsh with 2 plugins. One for syntax highlighting commands and another for showing auto-suggestions. It's really fast. The rest is nearly a default zsh set up in terms of zsh configuration. Everything is documented in my dotfiles https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles.

My prompt is a 1 liner that shows your git branch as well as coloring up $ to be red or not based on if the last command failed. Coincidentally I just released a blog post today on coloring up your prompt based on if the last command failed at https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/color-your-shell-prompt-red-i....

I stole/copied my setup from Nick Janetakis who's just great all around. Its worked for me through several new systems and many updates.

https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles

If anyone is looking for a word list of programming terms I have one with 500+ words in my dotfiles at https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles/blob/master/.vim/spell/en.utf-8.add.

Is anyone else mostly rolling with the zsh (not oh-my-zsh) defaults?

After so many years of using Bash I switched to zsh almost a year ago. I use the vanilla zsh set up with 2 plugins:

- https://github.com/zdharma-continuum/fast-syntax-highlightin... for very good and fast syntax highlighting

- https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions for auto-suggestions

I don't use a plugin manager, instead I put together a ~20 line shell script[0] which handles either cloning or pulling plugins, then you can load them in your zshrc[1].

I haven't found the need for anything else and my whole dev environment is based on using tmux, terminal Vim, etc.. Basically I spend a lot of time there in my day to day.

[0] https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles/blob/0076e508403c9981e393...

[1] https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles/blob/0076e508403c9981e393...

My set up is documented at https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles and I have a bunch of Vim related videos at https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/tag/vim-tips-tricks-and-tutorials.

This is what I've been doing for years (WSL 2). It's really solid if you combine tmux with terminal Vim. My dotfiles work exactly the same on my native Linux device as WSL 2 and it's fast too.

Here's a couple from my vimrc.

All of my aliases are listed in my dotfiles at: https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles/blob/master/.aliases

I handle both cases in my dotfiles: https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles/blob/a29ced43dd384f7226aaf0c384f56951869d0435/.bashrc#L59-L76

Screenshots and documentation are at: https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles