Dotfiles

My dotfiles repository, managed with ChezMoi.

0. Pre-requisites

Unix

The following packages should be installed with your package manager of choice:

curl

Windows

Install from the Microsoft Store:

The App Installer app. It includes the winget executable used by this chezmoi repo to install other apps. I haven't found a way to automate its installation here, so it needs to be done manually beforehand.
- Also make sure to run a command like winget list --exact Microsoft.PowerShell to get prompted to accept the source agreement terms.

NOTE: at some point I suggested that the PowerShell app also be installed from the Microsof Store but then became aware of some limitations. Now the chezmoi setup installs the PowerShell MSIX through winget.

1. Install chezmoi

General instructions here. Remember to make sure the path where chezmoi was installed is in your active PATH, which probably requires a restart of your terminal after running either command below.

Unix

Run the folowing line in the console

sh -c "$(curl -fsLS https://chezmoi.io/get)";

Windows

winget install --exact --id twpayne.chezmoi --source winget;

2. Install the dotfiles

Unix and Windows

NOTE: for my setup, I have to split the init and the apply commands so the sourceDir I override in the chezmoi config file takes effect during apply. --guess-repo-url=false is necessary because otherwise chezmoi rewrites the repo URL in a way that tries to authenticate to the repo, which is public, so there is no need to authenticate.

chezmoi init --apply=false --guess-repo-url=false --verbose https://github.com/alexvy86/dotfiles.git
chezmoi apply

Testing changes to the main chezmoi config template

This command is useful for testing changes to the .chezmoi.yaml.tmpl file, since space-handling with the template syntax is a pain to use correctly.

Unix

cat /path/to/.chezmoi.yaml.tmpl | chezmoi execute-template --init

Windows

Get-Content -Path /path/to/.chezmoi.yaml.tmpl | chezmoi execute-template --init

chezmoi execute-template --init can also take --promptString <name>=<value> but it also applies to the promptString function inside a template, not to promptStringOnce.

Notes

For Windows systems, the Windows Terminal settings assume that the Ubuntu distribution for WSL has been installed from the Microsoft Store. If that's not the case, the profile to launch Ubuntu might not show up in the profile dropdown in Windows Terminal.