Dotfiles

My personal config files and utils.

I’ve been using (and changing) these since about 2012-13. It’s unlikely that anyone can fork this and find it useful, but there might be odd things here that you can copy out into your setup.

The most interesting thing is probably init.org, which contains my emacs config.

If you’re interested in emacs / linux / dotfiles etc. I occasionally share stuff at https://www.mattduck.com.

How to install

1. Clone and update the submodules:

   $ git clone https://github.com/mattduck/dotfiles.git ~/dotfiles
   $ cd ~/dotfiles
   $ git submodule update --init --recursive
       

2. Do a one-off run of bin/,dotfiles-install. This creates symlinks from ~~/.FILENAME~ to $DOTFILES/FILENAME.symlink. Any existing files or directories are backed up to ~~/dotfiles_backup/$(date)~.
3. Source activate.sh in your bashrc. This script will:
   • Add $DOTFILES to your env: this is a path to the dotfiles directory.
   • Add $DOTFILES/**/bin to your $PATH.
   • Source $DOTFILES/**.dot.xx.sh in numeric order - eg. foo.dot.10.sh would be sourced before bar.dot.20.sh. Anything without a number (eg. baz.dot.sh) will be sourced last.
4. I don’t have a graceful/up-to-date way to install all the packages I use right now, so certain scripts/functions/aliases could fail. These will have to be installed manually.
5. In emacs you just have to M-x install-package on anything that’s missing and not automatically installed by use-package.
6. In vim, do :BundleInstall to install packages.

MacOS - $PATH issues

Tmux always runs as a login shell, which means /etc/profile gets read. On some OS X releases, this will run a utility called path_helper, which will always prepend a set of directories to your $PATH after .bashrc has run.

To disable this, you can reset your $PATH as part of .bashrc, and run the dotfiles setup afterwards:

# .bashrc
if [ -f /etc/profile ]; then
    PATH=""
    source /etc/profile
fi
source ~/dotfiles/activate.sh

See https://superuser.com/questions/544989/does-tmux-sort-the-path-variable/583502#583502 for more info.

Thanks

This takes inspiration from (and outright copies) ideas and configuration that I’ve seen from friends and colleagues, emacs.london, and various blogs/websites/videos/conferences etc.

Special mention to Zach Holman (where I copied the symlink and sourcing structure), Brandon Rhodes (for the idea of prefixing your scripts and commands with a comma), and Sacha Chua (for the idea of compiling init.el with org-mode, and aggregating a ton of useful emacs content).