nomasgrim / dotfiles

dotfiles for bash configuration on macOS; powered by fresh

dotfiles.github.io freshshell.com

Inspired by (and using some pieces from) Bash-It

Customizing the Terminal

macOs, bash, and Operator Mono

After watching Paul Irish's talk from Fluent 2012 I realized my dotfiles could use some attention. Generally, I throw some scripts in there as needed, but never take the time to figure out a good workflow for managing all the configurations. When I'm coding, I always have a Terminal open. With some fine tuning, the Terminal can offer a lot of power from a very simple interface. When you find your harmonious setup, you're going to want to share it across your machines and have backups.

Github Dotfiles is a community around publically sharing such setups. There's plenty of options and choices to make. This can be overwhelming but there's a few tools that help keep it simple.

I started my customization journey with bash-it, an obvious choice given my predisposition for bash (see footnote). Bash-It is a "shameless rippoff of oh-my-zsh" that provides a framework for including aliases, plugins, completions, and themes in your configuration. I combed through the files and picked out several features I wanted to keep and use as my own.

While Bash-It provides a nifty framework for bootstrapping its set of customizations, I wanted something more flexible and extensible to manage my setup. I installed fresh. With fresh, I can include anything from Bash-It's framework as well as any other Git-hosted code. So, rather than using Bash-It's bootstrap, I can use fresh's bootstrap to load Bash-It's files. Bash-It mirrors other files, like plugins, from popular shell libraries. With Fresh, I can go straight to the source and avoid the extra overhead of Bash-It.

I have yet to write a proper bootstrap script to get a new machine up and running, but "Cowboy" Ben Alman and Mathias Bynens have some pointers. The installation process is pretty simple on Mac OS X with Homebrew & git.

Also works & tested on debian-8.

Update: I wrote a simple installation script.

Clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/simshanith/dotfiles.git ~/.dotfiles

Run the install script:

~/.dotfiles/install.sh

Footnote: I think Sam Stephenson said it best when discussing his move from zsh to bash in his blog post "On Configuration".

What I discovered is that in many cases, my ability to adapt to a foreign environment without frustration is more important than the benefits of configuring a local environment to suit my whims. And that being able to quickly recreate my environment from scratch is an asset.