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/jfranz/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.

You'll also want to change git/gitconfig.symlink, which will set you up as committing as Zach Holman. You probably don't want that.

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 into $HOME when you run rake install.

A lot of stuff. Seriously, a lot of stuff. Check them out in the file browser above and see what components may mesh up with you. Fork it, remove what you don't use, and build on what you do use.

There's a few special files in the hierarchy.

• bin/: Anything in bin/ will get added to your $PATH and be made available everywhere.
• topic/*.zsh: Any files ending in .zsh get loaded into your environment.
• topic/*.symlink: Any files ending in *.symlink get symlinked into your $HOME. This is so you can keep all of those versioned in your dotfiles but still keep those autoloaded files in your home directory. These get symlinked in when you run rake install.
• topic/*.completion.sh: Any files ending in completion.sh get loaded last so that they get loaded after we set up zsh autocomplete functions.

There are a few things I use to make my life awesome. They're not a required dependency, but if you install them they'll make your life a bit more like a bubble bath.

• If you want some more colors for things like ls, install grc: brew install grc.
• If you install the excellent rbenv to manage multiple rubies, your current branch will show up in the prompt. Bonus.

I forked Zach Holman's dotfiles which are a fork of Ryan Bates' dotfiles. Thanks to them both being awesome.