ambevar-dotfiles/README.md

2.4 KiB

.dotfiles

Overview

I use of Emacs for almost everything, including my window manager (EXWM). See my Emacs pro-tips.

As such, the more-or-less advanced configurations of my former favourite Unix programs are gone (Awesome, cmus, fish, fzf, Mutt, newsbeuter, ranger, urxvt, zathura, zsh). You can search for them before the git commit README: The Big Emacs Shift.

I've also written a fair amount of scripts. The highlights include:

  • asciify: convert many non-ASCII characters to their nearest ASCII counterpart.

  • bsdman: read *BSD man pages.

  • crun: quick way to execute C files.

  • dataindex: create index of hierarchies. Useful to keep track of folder content and structure.

  • ediff: diff with Emacs.

  • einfo: info viewer with Emacs.

  • elisp: Emacs Lisp interpreter using Emacs.

  • git-*: some git helper functions for sync and so on.

  • homeinit: initialize a new home configuration, i.e. get needed files, create symlinks, etc.

  • imagemount: a CDEmu/fuseiso wrapper that creates/deletes virtual drives automatically.

  • mover: move and merge folder into destination.

  • pac*: pacman helper functions.

  • pdfctl: PDF manipulation, e.g. extract pages, compress, resize to A4.

  • pkglister: generate lists of installed with pacman, FreeBSD's pkg and tlmgr (TeX Live manager).

  • tc-video-*: batch conversion of any kind of videos. Using FFmpeg.

Setup

For the list of programs I currently use, see the .pkglists/ folder.

Dotfiles can be managed in different ways.

Direct versioning

Git makes it possible to use your home folder as a git repo, thus versioning all files directly.

cd
git init
git remote add origin <repo>
git fetch
git checkout master

GNU Stow

GNU Stow lets you symlink a project's files to an arbitrary folder.

The simplest setup would be to clone the dotfiles to, say, ~/dotfiles then run

cd ~/dotfiles
stow .

This has several advantages over direct versioning:

  • Subfolders in home are not subject to being included into the dotfiles git repository. This is especially relevant for projects under a version control system other than git.

  • No need for a .gitignore.

  • Simplified file control (add/remove/etc.).

  • You can fine-tune which program configuration to synchronize on a per-system basis.

  • You can manage several configurations for the same programs.