dotfiles

My dotfiles is probably the most copied code among my coworkers and today I will give a little break down of the code base.

zsh

I switched to zsh 3 years ago and never looked back. There’s also oh-my-zsh, a framework for managing ZSH configuration. The features I found most useful are:

• Tab completion, including hostnames and arguments
• History across multiple sessions
• Plugins and themes

My .zshrc is mostly out of the box with some aliases and a few plugins thrown in but decided to create my own theme. I use colors for hostname in the prompt, green for local and red for remote. I also tweaked git status a bit to show untracked files (red dots), unstaged (yellow) & staged (green) changes, plus number stashed changes since that’s the one thing I keep doing and forgetting about.

git

I use git both for work and personal projects, plus contributing to open source projects on GitHub. My .gitconfig includes both a global gitignore file and a templatedir, which includes hooks for ctags and Gerrit. The hooks are installed automatically for every repo.

Since I type hundreds of git commands on a daily basis, I aliased git to simply g and added a bunch more for checkout, commit, diff, rebase, etc. I also added several log aliases with better formats, including one-liner color history, graph, and commits only by me.

I also have a few git-* scripts to make my workflow a bit easier.

vim

I’ve been a vim user for 15+ years and have come up with a pretty good set of settings and plugins. I keep most complex settings in a vimrc.d directory and load them from .vimrc, which is kept short with mostly look and feel plus some basic settings. This way I can easily copy just the .vimrc to a remote server and have some decent setting to work with.

I depend on many plugins to get things done, roughly in the following categories.

• vim-powerline and vim-colors-solarized for look and feel. You might need to patch fonts for the fancy symbols though.
• gitv, vim-fugitive and vim-git for git integration.
• tagbar and nerdtree for sidebar, which I mapped to alt-1 and alt-2
• syntastic, probably the most valuable one, integrates with flake8 and other tools for syntax checking.
• A few more for shortcuts like quotes, tab completion, and commenting.
• And a few more for syntax highlighting of various programming languages that I work with.

tmux

As a data and backend engineer, I spend most of my time on remote servers and rely heavily on tmux for session management. I tend to create one session for each project and split windows when necessary for coding, tailing logs and interacting with the build system.

I changed my prefix from ctrl-b to ` since that’s the least used key and not too hard to reach.I also added bindings to split a window horizontally and vertically, plus vim style hjkl keys to move around. I also use tmux-powerline for a nicer status line. The same vim-powerline fonts work here too.

One thing I noticed is that re-attached screen or tmux doesn’t work well with SSH forwarding since the SSH_AUTH_SOCK is different for each session. So I created a snippet to symlink sock files to the same location.

xmonad

I use a Linux desktop at work and use xmonad as my window manager. It’s a tiling window manager which means instead of move and resize windows yourself, the manager tiles windows for you based on predefined layouts. Once I figured out a workflow, I found myself a lot more productive even when multi-tasking.

The main layout in my xmonad.hs uses left 3/5 of the screen for main window and the right 2/5 for others. The second layout splits horizontally 50/50 while the third is a grid layout, perfect for Cluster SSH into many servers.

There are also a couple of key bindings, including ones to control Spotify via this shell script.

bootstrapping

I started with putting my HOME directory in a git repo a few years ago, and over time added various dependencies across different platforms, e.g. aptitude, homebrew, pip and Vundle. Furthermore I access to a lot of virtual and bare-metal hosts and would like to streamline the processing of getting set up on a new host.

Inspired by homebrew, I created a bootstrap-dotfiles.sh that automates everything for me. The script is cross-platform and uses aptitude on Debian or Ubuntu and brew on Mac OS X for native packages. It also installs Python packages via pip, vim plugins via Vundle, checks out the git repo into HOME and changes the default shell to zsh.

summary

With this setup I can easily move into a new environment with all the tools and shortcuts configured exactly the same way. Nevertheless I still try to tweak it constantly, removing stuff I rarely use and adding new ones for things I found myself doing repeatedly. And that’s the same advice I gave to people who borrow my dotfiles, add one thing at a time and tweak it to your liking. Hope you all figure out something that makes you most productive.