Dotfiles

Why Track Dotfiles?

Dotfiles (like ~/.vimrc, ~/.bashrc, etc. in your home directory) manage the configurations, themes, and settings that you customize within your command line environment. Storing them in a GitHub repository ensures all your favorite configurations are safe and sound in a central place. If you ever want to revert back to a previous configuration, your hard drive gets damaged, or you want to replicate and sync your environment on another machine, you can do so with just a few simple steps.

Dotfiles Tracked in this Repo

bash_aliases
bash_profile
bashrc
vimrc
gitconfig

My Favorite Configurations

Spell check in vim (no more commit message typos!)
Minimal bash prompt
Function killport for managing port processes. See my blog post for more details on this.
Alias gml prints a pretty one-line format of git log filtered to only my commits

$ gml
* f074c20 2021-07-07 | Update `README` image links (HEAD -> main, origin/main) [Matt Heindel]
* 2d32e40 2021-07-05 | Add alias functions for managing server ports [Matt Heindel]
* ac0df26 2021-07-04 | Add welcome message that displays suggested files on opening bash [Matt Heindel]
* f728b13 2021-07-04 | New alias `cl` combines `cd` and `ls` commands [Matt Heindel]
* 9462a79 2021-07-04 | Modify alias `l` to sort files by most recent modification [Matt Heindel]

Complete Guide

If you’d like to track your dotfiles, check out this helpful blog post for a full guide.

Syncing from this Repository

When adding the configuration files here to a new machine, enter the following commands into bash.

cd ~
git clone https://github.com/matt-heindel/dotfiles.git
cd ~/dotfiles
chmod +x makesymlinks.sh
./makesymlinks.sh

Updating Tracked Dotfiles

Any time you change a tracked dotfile, make sure to:

git push from the machine with updates
git pull to any other machines you work on

Adding / Removing a Tracked Dotfile

When tracking a new file or removing a file from tracking, a few extra step are required.

Open the makesymlinks.sh file in vim
```
 vim ~/dotfiles/makesymlinks.sh
```
Scroll to the Variables section and update the line files="..." to be a space separated list of all dotfiles in the specified directory

```bash

#### Variables

dir=~/dotfiles # dotfiles directory
olddir=~/dotfiles_old # old dotfiles backup directory

update files to match dir

files=”bashrc vimrc bash_profile bash_aliases gitconfig” # list of files/folders to symlink in homedir

#

```

Remember in vim pressing i enters insert mode

Close and save with Esc then :wq
git commit with a descriptive message of changes
git push

References

The Smalley Creative Blog
Using Git and Github to Manage Your Dotfiles