assarbad/dotfiles

My dotfiles and some scripts I carry around in the dotfiles folder. No pull requests (this is actually a mirrored Mercurial repo).

 Oliver's dotfiles

About

This folder contains my dotfiles, i.e. all kinds of customized settings for programs I use regularly, starting with the shell (Bash: .bashrc) and not ending with my favorite editor (Vim: .vimrc).

Pick whatever you like. I have borrowed stuff here and there myself.

One shameless plug, however. I warmly recommend the following books:

• Bash Cookbook by Carl Albing, JP Vossen, Cameron Newham
• Practical Vim by Drew Neil (also check out his vimcasts.org and dotfiles)
• Hacking Vim by Kim Schulz

The mysterious GNUmakefile

You'll also find a GNUmakefile that can be used for two things.

• make (default and alias for make install)
• make setup

The setup behavior is to create a self-contained installer named dotfile_installer.sh (uuencode-d), based on the script of the same basename with the suffix .sh.in. In addition a second version named dotfile_installer.bin gets created as well. This installer will contain all the files from this folder, including the .hg folder (this is intentional!).

This way you can simply build this file once and download from a location you trust. It makes it possible to bootstrap my dotfiles conveniently on a system, even if no Mercurial is available (yet).

The other thing is to install it to your $HOME folder directly after checking it out into a working copy. To do this, make sure you are in the folder in which the dotfiles reside (~/.dotfiles on my systems; $DOTFILES for the remainder of this document) and then run make install. If you would want to use an alternate target location you'd have to set the TGTDIR variable in one of two ways when invoking make:

• TGTDIR=/my/custom/target/directory make install
• make TGTDIR=/my/custom/target/directory install

Local customizations

To keep local customizations of the dotfiles you have ~/.local/dotfiles at your disposal.

This folder contains the settings which override the global ones or get appended (on a per-file basis) to the respective global settings.

The structure of this folder is that there are three top-level subfolders:

• append
• custom
• override

Underneath append and override there will be a moniker for each respective machine in the form of a directory or a symlink to a directory.

The moniker is either _.domain.tld, i.e. leading underscore followed by the domain part that would be returned by hostname -f or the short name of the host, i.e. without any dots.

If the moniker exists as short name, it will take precedence.

Files in ~/.local/dotfiles/override will always be written to TGTDIR. Files in ~/.local/dotfiles/append will only be written if they already exist in TGTDIR.

Files that have already been appended will carry a marker as their last line.

NOTE this is a limitation. The marker will be a line starting with a hash mark. That is #. This creates a single-line comment in most configuration files. However, where this is not true you have to use one of the other two mechanisms for customization.

The ~/.local/dotfiles/custom differs in that it contains any or none of the following items:

• an executable file named PRE that will always be executed if it exists and passed the appropriate TGTDIR environment variable. It gets executed _prior_ to other customizations (such as append and override).

• an executable file named ALL that will always be executed if it exists and passed the appropriate TGTDIR environment variable.

• an executable file named $(whoami)@$(hostname -s) (user@hostname) takes precedence over an executable file named $(hostname -f) (just the hostname).

  • NB: the ALL script gets executed unconditionally and before all other scripts, if it exists.
  • If neither $(whoami)@$(hostname -s) nor $(hostname -f) existed (or if neither was executable), a script named after the domain (see above; example _.domain.tld) would also be taken into account.

• an executable file named POST that will always be executed if it exists and passed the appropriate TGTDIR environment variable. It gets executed _after_ all other customizations, including all the customization.

Testing without overwriting $HOME

If you simply want to test out what would be written, there are two special targets in the make file: test and nodel-test. Where nodel-test will more closely reproduce what would happen on subsequent runs of the install target, test will remove the target dir up front and create a fresh one.

Both targets will default to $HOME/dotfile-test for TGTDIR.

Epilogue

Hope this is useful for someone else. Write me an email if it is :)