A. Ford's Dotfiles

My take on a dotfile repo. Heavily based off of Zach Holman's dotfile repo. Using bash instead of ruby, mostly for a challenge.

Install

• git clone git://github.com/ajford/dotfiles.git ~/.dotfiles
• cd ~/.dotfiles
• bash unpack.sh

unpack.sh will automatically symlink all files to your home dir and add the dot, i.e. .dotfiles/foo/bar.symlink will be moved to $HOME/.bar.

Notice however, bash/ is handled a bit differently (though I'm rethinking this). bash/bashrc is explicitly moved to $HOME/.bashrc and bash/ is not walked. See below for more on unpack.sh.

Topics

Everything's built around topic areas. Aids keeping track of what corresponds to what.

Components

There's a lot going on in this repo. Here's a rundown:

• Topic folders - Used to separate sections
• unpack.sh - The heavy lifter, used to integrate the repo into your system
• */foo.sh - These files are sourced to load additional bash stuff
• */bar.alias - These are sourced to include various aliases
• */baz.symlink - These are symlinked into $HOME by unpack.sh

A couple of folders are treated differently

• bin/: This gets added to $PATH via the bashrc. It is not walked by

  the unpack function.

• bash/func.d: This folder is walked via the bashrc file. Its used to

  integrate bash functions that I use, and allows them to be separated into different files.

Unpack Behavior

The basic behavior is as follows:

• topic/*.symlink: Any files ending with *.symlink will be copied

  to $HOME with the extension removed, and the prefix dot added. I.e., foo/bar.symlink will become $HOME/.bar.

• bash/bashrc: This file is handled differently. It is symlinked to

  $HOME/.bashrc, and handles all foo/bar.sh and foo/baz.alias files.

• $HOME/.dotfiles_home: unpack.sh creates this file to point to the

  location of the dotfiles directory for use in the bashrc file.

unpack.sh gives you a few options when it runs into an existing file while attempting to unpack *.symlink files. Default behavior is to create a backup copy of the existing file in the form of $HOME/.existing_foo.bak. You are also given the opportunity to skip that file or overwrite it. There are also options to apply your choice to all following conflicts.

Dependencies

Most of what's in here shouldn't require dependencies. That's part of what made me choose bash for the unpack script. The virtualenv and python stuff of course depends on python, and virtualenvwrapper is required for the workon_walk bash function. The dotfiles repo should work fine without these dependencies, just not function in regards to those sections.

Bugs

As this repo is really meant for my personal use, I may occasionally make changes that break things due to dependencies or what not. If you have any trouble, feel free to create an issue.

Upcoming

Sometime soon there should be a script written to remove the changes made by unpack.sh. This may require a change to the extension that unpack.sh adds when backing up existing files (to prevent moving files not manipulated by unpack.sh.