So I just got a new computer, 13″ Retina MacBook Pro. I figured it would be a good time to spend the time setting up my dotfiles for quick setup and settings management.
If you are unfamiliar, dotfiles are the name given to system level files that are generally hidden because they begin with a ‘.’, get it? 😉 The beauty of using them is that with a few keystrokes in terminal, your new computer can be setup as sweet as your last in a matter of minutes.
Everything from setting up git and command line aliases, altering your shell appearance and installing your favorite applications to even updating default system preferences. Here is a snippet from what my system sets up, from my readme on github;
- Create a directory for github in ~
- Symlink the .gitconfig and .zshrc files
- Install apps / tools / fonts via Homebrew
- Set custom system preferences
- Open download links for apps not auto-installed
- Set up some git config, styling, and aliases
- Add some helpful functions and aliases
- Change your shell from Bash to Zsh
- The pure prompt
- Awesome z directory jumping
- Sweet syntax highlighting
- Tab completion
The Kinks
Of course, there are still some issues I need to work out that I noticed on my initial run of the script. Several of the OS X preferences did not take, not sure if because the source script I modeled after has some out-of-date info for Yosemite, but that is not a big deal. Another issue is the Homebrew Cask installs, I think there is a way to have the apps installed into the standard applications directory instead of symlinked by default, but I did not get that set up proper so am now having an issue where 1Password will not fill info into Google Chrome because of sandboxing…
Ah well, live and learn.
Anyways, if you are into dotfiles or have suggestions or questions, let me know!
