Dotfiles Are Meant to Be Forked

Well, it has been a while since I replaced my old (but gold) bash by the great zsh.

Anyway, I have my personal computer and my job computer, and, like almost every developer, I create aliases and scripts for everything I have to do repeatedly.

Well… you can imagine.. my .bashrc had about 300 lines. It was really big. Almost impossible to share with others, full of personal data, full of my machine specific data, bloated with old things I left behind… well, it was a real mess.

Then, I decided to make a huge step in my life: move to ZSH!

ZSH

Zsh is a powerful shell that operates as both an interactive shell and as a scripting language interpreter. While being compatible with Bash (not by default, only if you issue “emulate sh”), it offers many advantages such as: Faster, Improved tab completion, Improved globbing, Improved array handling, Fully customizable.

—- Arch Wiki about ZSH

But, well, I didn’t knew where to start. So, I forked [oh-my-zsh][ohmyzsh] project. I’ve used it for a while, also did some contributions… but well, it has so many things I didn’t use, and it doesn’t had a simple way to share configuration files across computers.

Then I found holman’s dotfiles. And it was perfect! Except for the fact that it was full of Mac OS X-related stuff.

So I tweaked, removed, tweaked, cleaned-up, tweaked, etc etc, and there it is, my all-new dotfiles!

They should work with both Linux and OS X (Linux lacks a little automation, tough), and I tweaked it to fit my taste.

Get it!

They are available on github!

The installation is pretty straightforward. Just clone it in ~/.dotfiles and run the script/bootstrap file. If you found any error, please, open an issue so I can fix them.

Also, take a look at the readme (pretty simple), it will make it easy to you to understand the topics and other features.

If you want, you can also read the holman’s post about his dotfiles.

If you wanna contribute with anything, just issue a pull-request. I’ll be glad to take a look at it!

That’s all folks, hope to see you soon!

This post was last updated in Feb 4, 2015.