dotfiles

These are my dotfiles. If you don’t like them I have others.

I followed the technique found at https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/dotfiles which is a more extensive explanation of the original found at HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11070797

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Install this dotfiles repository onto a new system or migrate to this setup

In your $HOME folder, add the next alias to shell config (.bashrc, .zshrc, ...)

We are using .dotfiles as a bare git repository to track file changes

alias dotfiles='/usr/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles/ --work-tree=$HOME'

Ignore our dotfiles repository

echo ".dotfiles" >> .gitignore

Clone this dotfiles remote repository into a bare repository in a "dot" folder of your $HOME:

git clone --bare <this-git-repo-url> $HOME/.dotfiles

Define the alias in the current shell scope:

alias dotfiles='/usr/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles/ --work-tree=$HOME'

Checkout the actual content from the bare repository to your $HOME:

dotfiles checkout

The step above might fail with a message like:

error: The following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by checkout:
    .zshrc
    .gitignore
Please move or remove them before you can switch branches.
Aborting

If that is your case just remove or backup the files (renaming them) and try again.

Set the flag showUntrackedFiles to no on this specific (local) repository to hide files we are not explicitly tracking yet. This is so that when you type dotfiles status and other commands later, files you are not interested in tracking will not show up as untracked.

dotfiles config --local status.showUntrackedFiles no