uploaded my dotfiles again

I’ve played this game before. I uploaded my dotfiles to github and failed.

This time is different. You can find them here. This time, instead of a horribly hacked Makefile installing the files, I’ve gone with symlinks which seems that others have been doing successfully.

But I am not using lndir because it doesn’t quite work the way I’d like. In some cases, I want the whole directory to be symlinked. In others, I want subfiles symlinked and I want fine grained control of that (but I want good defaults so adding new files isn’t a hassle). On top of this, I hate the idea of symlinking the dotfiles straight across. How ugly. I don’t want to have to ls -a in my sandbox of dotfiles all the time. The “install script” should be smart enough to prefix symlinked files with a . so that I can look at the files in the dotfiles dir “normally”.

These two factors made me decide to write the script you’ll find in there called lndotfiles.py. This script has some global variables that act like configuration and also does the magic explained above.

I also have the distinct problem of having separate dotfiles between my work computer and my home computer. I’ve (hopefully) solved this problem this time around by adding a ~/.home/ and ~/.work/ directories which will contain location specific config files that will get sourced by the associated config file via ~/.current/... where ~/.current is a symlink to the appropriate directory.

Another interesting extension is the alias I’ve added to my ~/.current/zshrc. If I’m editting dotfiles in my home directory, I shouldn’t need to cd into my dotfiles sandbox. Instead, I should have direct access to the dotfiles sandbox. The alias looks like this:

alias gitdot="git --git-dir=$HOME/sandbox/dotfiles/.git --work-tree=$HOME/sandbox/dotfiles/"

Now I can just use gitdot in place of git and work on my dotfiles from wherever I like.