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 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 rvm to manage multiple rubies, your current branch will show up in the prompt. Bonus.

I want this to work for everyone; that means when you clone it down it should work for you even though you may not have rvm installed, for example. That said, I do use this as my dotfiles, so there's a good chance I may break something if I forget to make a check for a dependency.

If you're brand-new to the project and run into any blockers, please open an issue on this repository and I'd love to get it fixed for you!

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.