dotfiles

Overview

I use of Emacs for almost everything, including my window manager (EXWM), except for the Nyxt web browser. 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.

E-mail setup

Emails can be particularly tricky to set up, so I think they deserve a dedicated section. My configuration files:

• for mbsync from the isync project to synchronize mail mailboxes
over IMAP.
• for the email indexer.
• A notmuch hook to tell Notmuch to use mbsync to fetch new emails.
• My Emacs' for the user interface with the helm-notmuch extension for
searches with live updates. (A must!)
• My Emacs' to send emails. I can afford to not rely on a
dedicated SMTP client (e.g. =msmtp=) since all my email accounts use the same SMTP server.
• My Emacs' and my script to synchronize the user
tags (but not the automatic ones) under version control.

Setup

For the list of programs I currently use, see the =.package-lists/= folder.

The homeinit script fully bootstraps a user profile with required files, folders, symlinks and applications.

The homeclean script removes trash files, cache and warns if critically private data is found (e.g. PGP keys).

The homesync script updates the package lists, prints the status of all known projects and optionally pushes the unmerged changes upstream.

As for managing a dotfiles repository, there are various approaches.

Direct versioning

Git makes it possible to use your home folder as a git repository, 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 .

Or, from a different location:

$ cd /path/to/dotfiles $ stow -t ~ .

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.

License

Unless stated otherwise, all files are under the GPL3 license. See COPYING for the full license.