My pale blue dotfiles

That's here, that's us, that's $HOME...

I manage my dotfiles with symlink-gardener, which is a tool I made because I was unhappy with existing tools that people use for dotfile management (like GNU stow).

I use keybase's encrypted git repo hosting to store my private dotfiles (which contain things like passwords).

Currently, my vim configuration is in a separate repo (see https://github.com/benburrill/.vim). Eventually, I would like to transfer it here while preserving the version history.

Installation

The setup script depends on bash, coreutils, python>=3.6, perl, and curl.

The setup script installs the "common" dotfile package (and optionally its private dotfiles counterpart) in addition to any platform-specific package passed as a command line argument. So setting up dotfiles for a platform that uses xfce would look like this:

$ ./setup xfce

The setup is (or should be) non-destructive. When there are conflicts, old files will be backed up to ~/.symlink-garden/weeds/, creating weed packages which can be re-installed with gardener to shadow the new dotfiles.

When the setup is finished, a list of requirements is generated (and saved to requires.list) based on # ~requires comments I scatter throughout my dotfiles. This is a human-readable reminder of things to install, although the names are often similar to those used by actual package managers. The importance of installing these "requirements" varies. You can grep around for ~requires x to get an idea for how each package is used.