Your dotfiles are how you personalize your system. These are mine. The very prejudiced mix: OS X, zsh, Ruby, Rails, git, homebrew, rvm, vim. If you match up along most of those lines, you may dig my dotfiles.

I 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. I realized I could split a lot of things up into the main areas I used (Ruby, git, system libraries, and so on), so I structured the project accordingly.

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

• git clone git:https://github.com/holman/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 into $HOME when you run rake install.

A lot of what's inside is just aliases: gs for git status, gl for git pull --rebase --prune, 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:

###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. The projects directory is defined in zsh/zshrc.symlink.
• check [filename] 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.
• backup is a quick hook into rsync to backup a selection of files. Check out the comments for more details.

###fun

• cloudapp uploads any file to CloudApp.

##moar custom There are a few things I use to make my life awesome. They're not a required dependency, but if you make it happen, THEY'LL MAKE YOU HAPPEN.

• 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. Bonus.

I forked Ryan Bates' excellent dotfiles for a couple years before the weight of my changes and tweaks inspired me to finally roll my own. But Ryan's dotfiles were an easy way to get into bash customization, and then to jump ship to zsh a bit later. A decent amount of the code in these dotfiles stem or are inspired from Ryan's original project.