.dotfiles

What is this?

These are my dotfiles, plus a bootstrap script to install them and all the other tools I commonly use.

Managing them like this has a few benefits:

• It makes it quick and easy to set up a new machine
• It makes it easy to keep my development environment consistent on different computers (eg. my work laptop and my home PC)
• It provides useful documentation for how and why I installed certain things

Requirements

None, apart from bash and git: when running bootstrap.sh for the first time it will install everything else it needs (Ansible, etc).

I use these dotfiles in Ubuntu on WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), but they should work without modification in Ubuntu (or similar flavours of Linux).

Usage

To use these dotfiles, git clone them to your home directory, then run the following command:

~/.dotfiles/bootstrap.sh

To install various optional extra things, you could also run:

~/.dotfiles/bootstrap.sh extra

...but that's definitely not essential. "extra" is an Ansible role for miscellaneous optional extras.

The bootstrap script runs the "common" tasks by default, but can also accept a comma-separated list of tags to run specific tasks only. eg:

~/.dotfiles/bootstrap.sh git,symlinks

How it works

Behind the scenes, bootstrap.sh uses Ansible to manage the changes it makes. The reason for this (and why it's preferable to, say, bash scripts) is that it's idempotent: ie. it can safely be run multiple times without changing the outcome.

The Ansible tasks are essentially declarative: they describe a state that the system should be in after they're run. If the system is already in this state (eg. if a tool is already installed, or a file already exists), they will do nothing. This makes it reasonably fast and safe to re-run all tasks if needed.

Highlights

There are a few things here I find particularly useful:

• delta - for nicer git diffs
• fzf - for enhanced bash history search, among other things
• tig - for browsing git history
• tldr - simplified man pages with practical examples of CLI commands
• z - for quickly jumping between recently-used directories
• The aliases in my .gitconfig (git l and git br in particular)