Your dotfiles are how you personalize your system. These are mine. The very prejudiced mix: OS X, zsh, Ruby, Rails, git, rvm, vim.

Holman was a little tired of having long alias files and everything strewn about (which is extremely common on other dotfiles projects, too). That led to this project being much more topic-centric. Like a true haxor he realized he could split a lot of things up into the main areas he used and structured the project accordingly. I liked it and forked it; in the process I simplified/removed alot of aspects that holman uses, and I don't.

If you're interested in the philosophy behind why projects like these are awesome, you might want to read Holman's post on the subject.

• git clone git:https://github.com/arifb/dotfiles ~/.dotfiles
• cd ~/.dotfiles
• rake install

The install rake task will symlink the appropriate files in .dotfiles to your home directory. Everything is configured and tweaked within ~/.dotfiles, though.

The main file you'll want to change right off the bat is zsh/zshrc.symlink, which sets up a few paths that'll be different on your particular machine.

Everything's built around topic areas. If you're adding a new area to your forked dotfiles — say, "Java" — you can simply add a java directory and put files in there. Anything with an extension of .zsh will get automatically included into your shell. Anything with an extension of .symlink will get symlinked without extension, as a dotfile into $HOME when you run rake install.

A lot of what's inside is just aliases: gs for git status for example. You can browse the aliases.zsh files in each topic directory. There's also a collection of scripts in bin you can browse. A few notable ones:

###rails

• s pings your system for any running Rails apps, and deathss will then kill all of them indiscriminately. ss starts up a new Rails server on the next available port- if 3000 is taken, it'll spin up your server on 3001.

###system

• c is an autocomplete shortcut to your projects directory. For example, c git and then hitting tab will autocomplete to github, and then it simply changes to my github directory.

• check [domain] is a quick script that tells you whether a domain is available to register.

• smartextract [filename] will extract about a billion different compressed/uncompressed/whatever files and you'll never have to remember the syntax.

• If you want some more colors for things like ls, install grc: brew install grc.

• If you install the excellent rvm to manage multiple rubies, your current branch will show up in the prompt.

Holman forked Ryan Bates' excellent dotfiles for a couple years before the weight of his changes and tweaks inspired him to roll his own.