dotfiles

My dotfiles describe my entire computer. They contain most of the configuration of my applications (both on the command line and on the GUI), but also the setup and update process as scripts. I'm using Ubuntu as my Linux distribution of choice. The content of tilde are the invisible configuration files in ~ and the content of exe are scripts linked in /usr/local/bin. I'm using Solarized Light as my color scheme and Input as my font. This is how my work environment looks like:

My main computer is a desktop machine. For on the Go usage, see below.

exogenesis

exogenesis is a shell script that sets up a fresh (minimal) install of Ubuntu for me. I also use it to set up the same environment inside a VM. When I run it again on an existing machine, it will add what I added since the last time I ran it and update things like packages or editor plugins. It takes care of:

• Adding APT repositories
• Installing and updating APT, Snap, pip, Gem, Go and Rust packages
• Installing and updating Vim plugins
• Setting the shell to Fish
• Linking my configuration files and scripts

exogenesis-gui is a second script that adds things I only need on GUI machines (not the VM). Those are mainly GUI apps (installed via apt, snap and flatpak) and a few tweaks to Gnome.

fish

I'm using fish as my shell. After using ZSH for many years, I noticed that it does many things I needed to configure in ZSH by default, and switched to it. The only thing I configured is that I use fzf because I really missed Ctrl+r for reverse searching and I like the incremental search.

The prompt is a tiny arrow (or a ✦ when there are jobs in the background) that is green when the last status exit was 0, and red otherwise. In the right prompt, I display the pwd and the current git status. I have a few aliases, scripts, and functions:

• With j (or jump) I can jump to my Code projects
• To start or continue working on a project, I use my tiny s (or start) function which starts (or attaches to) a tmux session for a project with the correct start directory.
• l is just ls -al
• git sed is a git alias to sed all files known to git (rhymes with git grep)
• mdoutline shows the outline of a Markdown document (only works correctly, if you don't use the 'underline' variant for headlines)
• serve serve the current directory via nginx
• gb is a prettier git branch
• gl is a prettier git log
• postgres and redis start a temporary PostgreSQL or Redis instance in a docker container
• compressability shows the size of a file, and its GZIPed and brotlied size
• churn shows the frequency of change of the files in git repo
• history-analysis shows the commands that you ran most in your (fish) shell
• each-project calls a command for each project in ~/Code in parallel
• gitkeeper checks if there is unpushed work on a repo (plus some more options)
• electric-monk runs gitkeeper for each project (replacement for an old gem of mine)
• battery shows the current battery status
• ecurl downloads something but uses caching via ETag
• gcp clones a repository, or, if it already exists, pulls
• ilns is an idempotent ln -s

vim

I'm doing all my programming and most of my writing in vim. My vim is very close to the default configuration, but I'm using tpope/vim-sensible to set a few reasonable defaults. Instead of configuring spaces, tabs and similar things, I use editorconfig to follow the convention of the projects. Additional language support is loaded on demand via sheerun/vim-polyglot.

To jump to files, I use a fuzzy file finder (junegunn/fzf) that I've bound to Ctrl+P. I use fd as the source for its suggestions which pays attention to .gitignore. I can't remember the last time I opened a file without it.

I use Tim Pope plugins for commenting (tpope/vim-commentary) as well as quoting/parenthesizing (tpope/vim-surround) and make both repeatable (tpope/vim-repeat).

I run my Ruby tests and specs via a key binding (skalnik/vim-vroom).

Finally, I'm using w0rp/ale for formatting, linting feedback and LSP support. Code is formatted automatically with prettier or a similar tool if it is available for the programming language. I show a 😺 in lines with linting errors, with details on hovering. The linters are autodetected, and I have quite a few installed. When pressing tab (and I'm not at the beginning of a line, where I actually want to insert a tab) I run the omnifunc provided by ALE to ask the according language server for a completion.

Other commandline tools

• git is the only version control system I use. It has two amazing companions: tig and delta
• tmux is the terminal multiplexer I use. I configured it with some more vim-like bindings and a nice status bar with the current time and battery charge.
• ripgrep is a replacement for grep that is so fast, that I can't really believe it
• fd is the same for find
• jq is like sed for JSON data, but I mostly use it for pretty printing
• tree prints the folder structure as a tree
• wget and curl
• pry is a replacement for Ruby's IRB with amazing_print
• ragel is a beautiful state machine compiler
• yt-dlp allows me to download videos for train trips
• docker and docker-compose because I really wish it would do what I want
• shellcheck to get feedback about shell scripts
• asciinema to record terminal things
• direnv to load and unload environment variables depending on the current directory
• ffmpeg for converting video and audio
• htop as a replacement for top to see how my cores and RAM are doing
• neofetch for those screenshots, you know
• pandoc to convert between Markdown and... other formats like Microsoft Word
• pgcli to peek into PostgreSQL databases
• spotify_player to listen to music
• pdftk for tweaking PDF documents

GUI

Even though I enjoy to use the command line for most things, there are certain things where I use a GUI 😉

• Firefox and Chromium
  • Firefox is my main browser
  • Chromium is only here for testing (and for the weird websites that only work on Chrome...)
  • They are also installed in the Non-GUI box for automatic testing in headless mode
• Thunderbird as my email and calendar application
• Kitty as my terminal emulator
• Playing video and audio files with mpv, viewing PDFs with evince and images with eog
• Editing images with Drawing and sound with Audacity
• I'm using 1Password for password management on all my devices
• Flatseal for tweaking packages installed via Flatpak
• OBS as a virtual camera
• Pika for backups, using BorgBase for offsite backups
• Piper is a GUI for libratbag which I use to configure my mouse
• Tangram for different chat apps that are websites anyway (currently mostly Slack)
• Microsoft Teams and Zoom for video calls

Programming Languages

These are the programming languages I use:

• Ruby
  • Ruby is installed via the Fullstaq Ruby repository
  • This includes rbenv to switch between versions
• JavaScript/TypeScript (Node, Browser or Deno)
  • Node is installed via the NodeSource repository
• CSS
• Go
  • Go is installed via the regular Ubuntu repository

I like to play around with other languages like Rust as well. I even wrote my own little language 😄

Usage on the Go

On the go, I use a MacBook Pro. I mainly use the built-in apps with few exceptions. I also use the Mac for trainings and talks, as I need PowerPoint for that.

For development, I have installed nothing but Vagrant, VirtualBox, iTerm2, and the Xcode Command Line Tools. My dotfiles contains a Vagrantfile to provision the Vagrant box running in VirtualBox with Ansible. This replicates my Desktop computer. So when I want to start developing on my machine, I do a vagrant up && vagrant ssh and then I work inside the Vagrant box.

Making GPG available in the box

Thanks for @bascht for helping me setting this up.

On my Mac, I have GPGTools installed to write and receive GPG encryped emails. The GPG agent on my Mac is configured to create an extra GPG socket.

# ~/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf
default-cache-ttl 300
max-cache-ttl 999999
enable-ssh-support
extra-socket /Users/moonglum/.gnupg/S.gpg-agent.extra

SSH is then configured to forward that extra socket to the virtual machine:

# ~/.ssh/config
Host 127.0.0.1
  RemoteForward /var/run/user/1000/gnupg/S.gpg-agent /Users/moonglum/.gnupg/S.gpg-agent.extra
  ExitOnForwardFailure yes

In addition to that, the host and machine share the pubring.gpg and trustdb.gpg. They are both in the folder of this repo (but gitignored), and then linked to the according locations.

Thanks

• To Drew Neil for his books about vim: Practical Vim and Modern Vim
• To Brian P. Hogan for his book about tmux
• To Gary Bernhardt for his screencasts
• To Dirk, Bascht & Bodo for letting me steal from their dotfiles and providing feedback