dotfiles

dotfiles is a dotfiles manager. It allows you to organize, modify, and selectively load your dotfiles for maximum developer happiness.

Overview

This is a humble app with a small scope. It's just a place to put your dotfiles, and some convenience functions to help make managing them easy.

Everything related to dotfiles lives in ~/.dotfiles. The dotfiles themselves all live in available/ sub-folder, and those you wish to load will be represented as symlinks in enabled/. ~/.dotfiles/bootstrap is your entrypoint, and is sourced from .bashrc. Dotfiles has not been tested on shells other than bash.

I have a bunch of dotfiles already in the available/ folder. They are left as simple suggestions and are not garaunteed to run on your machine. You should not blindly enable dotfiles you haven't personally reviewed. You may wish to delete them all and start fresh.

Dotfiles is a git repository. It is meant to be forked and made private and personal, because everyone's dotfiles are different. Future versions of this app may offer a better upgrade experience, the ability to share dotfiles with others, the ability to see your changes without reloading the shell, and sub-commands to make version control easier. Suggestions, bug-reports, and PRs are welcomed.

Getting Started

Install dotfiles

$ npm install --global @code_monk/dotfiles

Verify installation

$ dotfiles ls # or
$ dotfiles help # or
$ dotfiles enable prompt # enable a fancy prompt
$ bash # reload shell to see the effect

Commands

dotfiles ls

List all files managed by dotfiles.

$ dotfiles ls # roughly the same as:
$ tree ~/.dotfiles/enabled ~/.dotfiles/available

dotfiles enable {dotfile}

Enable a dotfile. It creates a symlink in enable/ to it's corresponding sibling in available/. Example:

$ dotfiles enable prompt # same as:
$ ln - ~/.dotfiles/available/prompt ~/.dotfiles/enabled/prompt

dotfiles disable {dotfile}

Does the reverse

dotfiles cat {dotfile}

read the text of a dotfile.

$ dotfiles cat prompt # same as:
$ cat ~/.dotfiles/available/prompt

dotfiles edit {dotfile}

Open the default editor and edit the specified file.

$ dotfiles edit prompt # roughly the same as:
$ vim ~/.dotfiles/available/prompt