dotfiles

This readme along with an install script will help you get everything running in a few minutes. It contains a bunch of configuration for the tools I use. I also have a number of blog posts and videos related to my dev environment.

🧬 Who Is This For?

This project is more than a few config files. In 1 command and ~5 minutes it can take a new or existing system and install / configure a number of tools aimed at developers. It will prompt or warn you if it’s doing a destructive action like overwriting a config file. You can run the idempotent install script multiple times to stay up to date.

There’s too many things to list here but here’s the highlights:

• Set you up for success with command line tools and workflows

• Tweak out your shell (zsh)

• Set up tmux

• Fully configure Neovim

• Create SSH / GPG keys if they don’t already exist

• Install modern CLI tools

• Install programming languages

It supports Arch Linux, Debian, Ubuntu and macOS. It also supports WSL 2 for any supported Linux distro.

If you don’t plan to run the install script that’s ok, everything is MIT licensed. The code is here to look at.

🧾 Documentation

• Themes

• Quickly Get Set Up

• FAQ

• How to personalize these dotfiles?

• How to theme custom apps?

• How to add custom themes?

• How to fix Neovim taking a long time to open when inside of WSL?

• Where is the original Vim config?

• About the Author

🎨 Themes

Since these dotfiles are constantly evolving and I tend to reference them in videos, blog posts and other places I thought it would be a good idea to include screenshots in 1 spot.

Tokyonight Moon

Gruvbox Dark (Medium)

I prefer using themes that have good contrast ratios and are clear to see in video recordings. These dotfiles currently support easily switching between both themes but you can use any theme you’d like.

If you want to see icons you’ll need a "nerd font". There’s hundreds of them on https://www.nerdfonts.com/font-downloads with previews. I personally use Inconsolata NF which these dotfiles install for you.

Setting a theme

These dotfiles include a dot-theme-set script that you can run from your terminal to set your theme to any of the themes listed above.

You can look in the themes/ directory to see which apps are themed.

If you don’t like the included themes that’s no problem. You can add custom themes.

After installing these dotfiles you can switch themes with:

# Get a full list of themes by running: dot-theme-set --list
#
# Optionally you can skip adding a theme name and a random theme will be chosen.
dot-theme-set THEME_NAME

When switching themes most apps will update automatically, but if you have a bunch of shells already open you can run the SZ (source zsh) alias to source new theme related configs.

Not all terminals are supported, if yours didn’t change then check theming custom apps.

✨ Quickly Get Set Up

There’s an ./install script you can run to automate installing everything. That includes installing system packages such as zsh, tmux, Neovim, etc. and configuring a number of tools in your home directory.

It even handles cloning down this repo. You’ll get a chance to pick the clone location when running the script as well as view and / or change any system packages that get installed before your system is modified.

🌱 On a fresh system?

We’re in a catch-22 where this install script will set everything up for you but to download and run the script to completion a few things need to exist on your system first.

It comes down to needing these packages, you can skip this step if you have them:

• curl to download the install script

• bash 4+ since the install script uses modern Bash features

• This is only related to macOS, all supported Linux distros are good to go out of the box

Here’s 1 liners you can copy / paste once to meet the above requirements on all supported platforms:

Arch Linux

# You can run this as root.
pacman -Syu --noconfirm --needed curl

Debian / Ubuntu

# You can run this as root.
apt-get update && apt-get install -y curl

macOS

If you run bash --version and it says you’re using Bash 3.X please follow the instructions below:

# Curl is installed by default but bash needs to be upgraded, we can do that
# by brew installing bash. Once this command completes you can run the install
# script in the same terminal where you ran this command. Before running the
# install script `bash --version` should return a version > 3.X.

# OPTION 1: Using Apple silicon?
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)" \
&& eval "$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)" \
&& brew install bash \
&& bash

# OPTION 2: Using an Intel CPU?
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)" \
&& eval "$(/usr/local/bin/brew shellenv)" \
&& brew install bash \
&& bash

# The colors will look bad with the default macOS Terminal app. These dotfiles install: https://ghostty.org/

⚡️ Install script

You can download and run the install script with this 1 liner:

BOOTSTRAP=1 bash <(curl -sS https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nickjj/dotfiles/master/install)

If you’re not comfortable blindly running a script on the internet, that’s no problem. You can view the install script to see exactly what it does. The bottom of the file is a good place to start. Sudo is only used to install system packages. Alternatively you can look around this repo and reference the config files directly without using any script.

Please understand if you run this script on your existing system and hit yes to some of the prompts your config files will get overwritten. Always have good backups!

You can also run the script without installing system packages:

BOOTSTRAP=1 bash <(curl -sS https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nickjj/dotfiles/master/install) --skip-system-packages

The above can be useful if you’re using an unsupported distro of Linux in which case you’ll need to install the dependent system packages on your own beforehand. Besides that, everything else is supported since it’s only dealing with files in your home directory.

This set up targets zsh 5.0+, tmux 3.1+ and Neovim v0.11+. As long as you can meet those requirements you’re good to go. The install script will take care of installing these for you unless you’ve skipped system packages.

🐳 Try it in Docker without modifying your system:

# Start a Debian container, we're passing IN_CONTAINER to be explicit we're in Docker.
docker container run --rm -it -e "IN_CONTAINER=1" -v "${PWD}:/app" -w /app debian:stable-slim bash

# Copy / paste all 3 lines into the container's prompt and run it.
#
# Since we can't open a new terminal in a container we'll need to manually
# launch zsh and source a few files. That's what the last line is doing.
apt-get update && apt-get install -y curl \
&& bash <(curl -sS https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nickjj/dotfiles/master/install) \
&& zsh -c ". ~/.config/zsh/.zprofile && . ~/.config/zsh/.zshrc; zsh -i"

Keep in mind with the Docker set up, unless your terminal is already configured to use Tokyonight Moon then the colors may look off. That’s because your local terminal’s config will not get automatically updated.

🚀 Keeping things up to date and tinkering

Once you’ve installed these dotfiles you can run cd "${DOTFILES_PATH}" to manage them.

Here’s a few handy commands, you can run ./install --help to see all of them:

• ./install

• Run the install script based on the local copy of your dotfiles

• Keeps your system up to date or apply local changes

• ./install --skip-system-packages

• Run the install script like above but skip installing or updating packages

• Helps regenerate symlinks, configs and everything else without modifying packages

• ./install --pull

• Pulls in the latest remote commits but doesn’t run the install script

• Lets you review any changes locally before the install script runs

• ./install --update

• Pulls in the latest remote commits and runs the install script

• Shortcut to pull and run the install script together

• ./install --diff-config

• Compare your local install-config to the local install-config.example

• Helps keep your git ignored install-config in sync with new options

• ./install --diff

• Compare what you have locally vs the latest remote commits

• See what will change if you --update without modifying your git tree

• ./install --new-commits

• Show new remote commits that do not exist locally

• Present a quick list of what’s available to pull locally

• ./install --changelog

• Show all remote commits

• Present a quick list of all commits to see what has changed

• ./install --local-files

• Show all local git ignored files such as configs, history and scripts

• Useful to see everything not committed and for optionally backing up those files

• Example: ./install --local-files | xargs zip dotfiles-personal.zip

There’s also a LOCAL=1 environment variable you can set when bootstrapping or running the other install commands. This is handy for doing local tests in containers without needing to commit, push and pull changes.

🛠 Make it your own

If you just ran the install script and haven’t done so already please close your terminal and open a new one.

There’s a few ways to customize these dotfiles ranging from forking this repo to customizing install-config which is git ignored. The second option lets you adjust which packages and programming languages get installed as well as configure a number of other things.

Before you start customizing other files, please take a look at the personalization question in the FAQ.

🪟 Extra WSL 2 steps

In addition to the Linux side of things, there’s a few config files that I have in various directories of this dotfiles repo. These have long Windows paths and are in the mnt/c/ directory.

It would be expected that you copy those over to your system while replacing "Nick" with your Windows user name if you want to use those things. The Microsoft Terminal config will automatically be copied over to your user’s path.

It’s expected you’re running WSL 2 with WSLg support to get clipboard sharing to work between Windows and WSL 2. You can run wsl.exe --version from WSL 2 to check if WSLg is listed. Chances are you have it since it has been supported since 2022! All of this should "just work". If clipboard sharing isn’t working, check your .wslconfig file in your Windows user’s directory and make sure guiApplications=false isn’t set.

If you see ^M characters when pasting into Neovim, that’s a Windows line ending. That’s because WSLg’s clipboard feature doesn’t seem to handle this automatically. If you paste with CTRL+SHIFT+v instead of p it’ll be ok. I guess the Microsoft Terminal does extra processing to fix it for you.

Pay very close attention to the mnt/c/Users/Nick/.wslconfig file because it has values in there that you will very likely want to change before using it. This commit message goes into the details.

Also, you should reboot or from PowerShell run wsl --shutdown and then re-open your WSL instance to activate your /etc/wsl.conf file (the install script created this).

You may have noticed I don’t enable systemd within WSL 2. That is on purpose. I’ve found it delays opening WSL 2 by ~10-15 seconds and also any systemd services were delayed from starting by ~2 minutes.

🔍 FAQ

How to personalize these dotfiles?

The install-config lets you customize a few things but chances are you’ll want to personalize more than what’s there, such as various Neovim settings. Since this is a git repo you can always do a git pull to get the most up to date copy of these dotfiles, but then you may find yourself clobbering over your own personal changes.

Since we’re using git here, we have a few reasonable options.

For example, from within this dotfiles git repo you can run git checkout -b personalized and now you are free to make whatever changes that you want on your custom branch. When it comes time to pull down future updates you can run a git pull origin master and then git rebase master to integrate any updates into your branch.

Another option is to fork this repo and use that, then periodically pull and merge updates. It’s really up to you. By default these dotfiles will add an upstream git remote that points to this repo.

How to theme custom apps?

You’d add its theme file to each theme in themes/ and update the install script’s set_theme function to symlink the config. If your app has no dedicated config file, you can copy what I did for the Microsoft Terminal in set_theme.

Happy to assist in your issue / PR to answer questions if you want to contribute your change.

How to add custom themes?

1. Locate the themes/ directory in this repo
2. Copy one of the existing themes’ directory
3. Rename your directory, this will be your theme’s name
4. Adjust all of the colors as you see fit

Switch to it by running dot-theme-set NEW_THEME_NAME and use the name you picked in step 3.

If you added a theme with good contrast ratios please open a pull request to get it added to this project.

Where is the original Vim config?

I’ve made dozens of blog posts and videos about Vim. Sometimes I linked directly to a commit so there’s a permalink to it but other times I did not.

Before switching to Neovim I made a vim git tag. You can check out the state of the repo for that tag by going here. You’ll see .vimrc in the root directory. If you cloned these dotfiles locally you can git checkout vim. Keep in mind that’s frozen to that point in time. Future updates unrelated to Vim will not be included in that tag.

👀 About the Author

I’m a self taught developer and have been freelancing for the last ~20 years. You can read about everything I’ve learned along the way on my site at https://nickjanetakis.com. There’s hundreds of blog posts and a couple of video courses on web development and deployment topics. I also have a podcast where I talk to folks about running web apps in production.