Neal's Dotfiles

My configs at any given time live here, to make migrating to a new machine easier. They're public so you can take advantage if you like.

I don't include scripts to automatically set configs on a new machine, because I find walking through them, re-evaluating the value of each tool, and getting the latest versions to be a useful exercise.

Tools

This repo contains configurations for:

• Neovim
• Oh My ZSH
• Vim (historical - I haven't used this in some time and will likely remove from the repo soon.)
• Zsh

The configurations tend to be pretty minimal. Mostly colors, aliases, and creature comforts. I'm not a big plugin-maxxer.

Layout

Dotfiles (nvim, zsh, etc.)

There is a directory corresponding to each tool, with configurations set up.

Scripts

There is also a scripts/ directory containing some convenient scripts to keep packages updated and cleaned. I run them ~daily, and they are appropriately called osx-daily and fedora-daily. These are the only OS-dependent things in the repo, and only then because I want the Fedora script to manage dnf packages. Everything else here should be sufficienctly abstracted to be OS-independent.

Env

The file oh-my-zsh/custom/env.zsh is .gitignore'd, so that machine-specific preferences have a place to live. Things like machine secrets, or invocations of scripts living at different paths, can reside here.

Setup

While I'd encourage looking at the setup for each tool and adopting the pieces you want...fully adopting all of the configs is easy, as this is how I keep everything git-tracked. You can make sure all of the tools are installed, and then run something like the following from the root of this repo:

# Each step preserves a backup of your original config, and links this repo's content to the location

mv ~/.config/nvim ~/.config/nvim.bak
ln -s $(pwd)/nvim $HOME/.config/nvim

mv ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom.bak
cd oh-my-zsh/custom
for file in * ; do
    ln -s $(pwd)/$file $HOME/.oh-my-zsh/custom/$file
done

mkdir ~/.zsh_backups
mv ~/.zshrc ~/.zlogin ~/.zprofile ~/.zshenv ~/.zsh_backups
ln -s $(pwd)/zsh/.zshrc $HOME/.zshrc
ln -s $(pwd)/zsh/.zprofile $HOME/.zprofile
ln -s $(pwd)/zsh/.zlogin $HOME/.zlogin
ln -s $(pwd)/zsh/.zshenv $HOME/.zshenv

# This will put the `daily` script in an executable path - fedora is used as an example but it's the same premise for other OSes.
chmod +x ./scripts/fedora-daily
ln -s $(pwd)/scripts/fedora-daily /usr/local/bin/daily

Notes

• The order of ZSH file loading is .zshenv -> .zprofile (login shells) -> .zshrc (interactive shells) -> .zlogin (login shells)
• The Nvim package manager I use is the builtin VimPack. I tried Lazy.nvim, and I imagine the async triggers etc. are worth it if you are very plugin-heavy. I have found VimPack to be very clean and simple.
• ~/.oh-my-zsh is a git repo of the OMZ framework, and custom/ is the gitignored path where all user-defined content goes.