Setup a dotfiles repo: A system to secure your life-long settings (e.g. .Rprofile)

[maurolepore]

A lot of the pain or pleasure you experience in R depends on how you set things up. Once you customize things the way you like you should secure those settings, e.g. on GitHub. Hopefully you read this before you lose a computer.

I propose to work together in learning more about dotfiles, and on creating or improving out dotfiles repo (I would love some help from Unix experts).

--

Programs are usually configured using plain-text hidden files1, commonly referred to as dotfiles, that are stored in the user’s home directory [e.g. .Rprofile]. ... tweaking and optimizing settings ... result in a significant increase in productivity.
You will keep using and improving your dotfiles for your entire career. Your dotfiles will most likely be the longest project you ever work on. For this reason, it is worthwhile to organize your dotfiles project in a disciplined manner for maintainability and extensibility. -- https://www.anishathalye.com/2014/08/03/managing-your-dotfiles/

See also https://dotfiles.github.io/

[alistaire47]

Four thoughts:

• Love it
• TZ=UTC in ~/.Renviron has saved me untold time doing battle with timezones and made my life dramatically better
• this tweet from Thomas Lin Pedersen is relevant/effectively the docs for R startup
• Whatever this produces should take serious account of how people manage secrets like API keys (not just how they should, but how they do) so nobody accidentally commits all their secrets

[rpodcast]

I've heard about a great dotfiles system called yadm (stands for Yet Another Dotfile Manager) and many in the linux community have spoken quite highly about it. I'd be all for diving into this and see how we can write a getting started guide geared towards R users 😄