Dotfiles

Dotfiles are hidden files that store configuration settings for various programs on your computer. They are often used to customize your system to your liking.

Unlike some people, I don't like to keep absolutely everything in my dotfiles. There's some fun in setting up your system from scratch!

I keep the following in my dotfiles:

• Neovim
• tmux
• Zsh
• SSH
• VSCode (Mostly the Vim bindings in case I ever need to open VSCode)

These are configurations that I would struggle to replicate if I lost them. Having them in my dotfiles means I can easily get up and running. I opt not to keep things like my brew packages in my dotfiles and instead install them as I go through setup.

Setting up

To initialise my dotfiles on a new machine, I use the following commands to symlink my dotfiles to the correct locations:

git clone https://github.com/samobrien13/dotfiles.git
brew install stow
cd dotfiles
stow . -D $HOME

Neovim

Neovim is my editor of choice, and I have a few plugins that I use to make my life easier. I use telescope to search for files. I use LSP to provide autocompletion and diagnostics. And I also have copilot for autocompletion. Fugitive is used for git actions. Other than that I don't really use anything outside the command line. Set up is heavily based on theprimeagen.

tmux

I make heavy use of tmux for managing my terminal windows. This includes the tmux-sessionizer script which allows me to lookup all my repos and open them in a new tmux session.

Aerospace

After years of getting by with the native OSX window manager, I finally found Aerospace. I had tried tools like BetterTouchTool but they were never really what I was looking for. I full screen everything, so being able to assign windows to any key plus the alt key is all I ever needed.