tangledhelix / Dotfiles

About

This repository contains my personal dotfiles, which I use on unix systems of varying flavors, and on my Macs. They are published here because I occasionally want to share them or use them as examples, and this is an easy way to do so. Feel free to use anything you find here.

Note however, that I do not make any particular effort to make this easy for others to use. I randomly move things around, add and remove Vim bundles, according to my needs. If you want to use these dotfiles, I would definitely suggest forking them to your own repo so you can selectively merge changes as you see fit. YMMV.

Requirements

I use Ansible to deploy my shell files, that's just about the only requirement. If you want to use my Vim module updater, that's written in Python 3.

Compatibility

I am a Zsh user. This repo goes in conjunction with Oh My Zsh. It'll work fine if you use Bash or another shell, it just won't do anything to set those shells up.

I'm a Vim user. If you use Emacs or something else, same as with Zsh... not a problem, but you won't get much Emacs functionality from these dotfiles.

I use this setup with macOS, and Linux (RHEL, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu).

Some parts of the Zsh and Vim configs may assume you have 256 color support in your terminal. If you are using Apple Terminal before OS X Lion, you don't. Try iTerm2 instead.

I have written two blog posts on the subject of iTerm and iTerm2. Give them a read; color support is only one of several good reasons to switch.

iTerm > Terminal

iTerm2 > iTerm

Shell colors

The colors in the Zsh shell prompts may assume a certain color scheme in the terminal; they may look odd in other schemes. I change that color decision on a whim and may forget to update this README.

Installation

I use Ansible to deploy my dotfiles. This setup requires a hosts inventory file. That is not present in this repository as it's specific to me. See Ansible's documentation for info about the format of the inventory file. (There is more than one available format.)

To install or update the Vim bundles, use the update_vim.py script. The list of Vim bundles is defined in that script. If you modify the list, you'll want to do an update. This will refresh existing modules, install new ones, and clean out old ones no longer in the list.

./update_vim.py

Note this will just update the repository copy. To install them, use the Ansible playbook. Anything in the bundle directory will be installed on the target.

A minimal Ansible hosts file for your local system looks like this.

[all]
localhost

A typical Ansible deploy to localhost looks something like this.

ansible-playbook -K -i hosts -l localhost site.yml

I don't want to write yet another Ansible tutorial so if you want to know more about Ansible or playbooks, you can look up Ansible's documentation for those things.