Dotfiles Part 2: I Knew It Couldn't Be That Easy

    As I discussed in the first post, I wanted a place to store my dotfiles where I could easily pull them down onto a new system. Github has become a popular place for this. It makes sense. Github is a cloud based git repo that you can easily reach from anywhere you have an internet connection. Git is a VCS which makes it easy to track changes to text files, which dotfiles are by definition. A simple git clone on a new system, and you have all your files ready and waiting for you.

    There are, of course, some issues with simply creating a git repo out of your entire home directory. So, many systems have been created which usually use symlinks to point into the repo controlled directory instead. There is even a nice listing available on the unofficial guide at github at http://dotfiles.github.io. It lists out some bootstrap systems to handle the symlinking and setup. It moves on to some app specific options, for things like shells and editors which may have extensive config and plugins that may be better managed with a dedicated system. Lastly, it covers general purpose dotfiles utilities, which may do more than just symlinking and syncing them for you.

    I've started to figure out how I wanted to manage my dotfiles many times over the years, and never gotten much further than looking at this massive page of options, opening up many of them in tabs, and then getting overwhelmed or distracted. This time, however, I was determined to make a choice and start trying to implement it. Even if it didn't end up being the solution I use in the end, I needed to get started at some point and figure out what would and wouldn't work for me. So, I made an initial pick.

Dotfiles: More Than Meets the Eye

    Dotfiles are pretty important. Anyone who has used a *NIX OS for a while will recognize the truth of this simple statement. For the uninitiated, Linux, Unix, and BSD (and OSX, which is a variant of BSD) operating systems have many things in common. One of these things is that files whose name begins with a period, like .config for example, are treated specially and hidden from the vanilla file list command, ls. Now, they aren't super secret or anything. A simple -a added to the ls command (making it ls -a) will show them again, they are just hidden by default. Due to the naming and pronunciation (.config would be spoken dotconfig by most people) they have become known collectively as dotfiles.

    The assumption is that they will be system files, usually configuration settings and the like, that you won't work with every day and won't want cluttering up your file listings all the time. Which is a pretty good assumption considering that the things multiply like crazy. These days it isn't just dotfiles, you have entire subdirectories that hold all sorts of things for whatever program uses them. Example, I have a .weechat that holds all the config settings, plugins, and chat logs from my irc client. Many programs use these the way Windows programs use their directory under Program Files. It is a good system, as it keeps the config easily findable in the user's home directory and also keeps the config user specific.

    Since they control the configuration of so many different pieces of your system, the dotfiles become important. They are how your system has been configured the way you like it. How it knows the behavior you want. They become very valuable, and over time, very difficult to replace. Some people spend years making small modifications to files like .bashrc and .vimrc until the resulting config is perfect. However, recreating it from scratch might be impossible as you won't remember what the setting you found on that obscure blog 3 years ago that solved this one issue was. You basically have to start over and tweak slowly until you arrive at another working, but inevitably different, config.