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I’ve tried a lot of different approaches to managing my dotfiles over the years. They varied in scope and complexity, but they all eded up being too much work to maintain. So this is my final iteration¹.

“philosophy”

I automate as little of the initial setup as possible (installing apps etc.). Spending time automating something that it’s quite unlikely I’ll ever run again on the same OS, the same hardware, or even the same desired end goal, just wasn’t worth the effort for me.
I only change the defaults when I absolutely have to.

Highlights

I use a bare git repository - mads-hartmann/dotfilesv2 - in my $HOME folder for the actual dotfiles
I maintain a little setup guide for the few occasions where I actually have to set up a new mac from scratch (see below).
I use ZSH as my shell (that’s the default since macOS Catalina). I use Spaceship as my prompt configuration.

Setting up a new mac

Install command-line tools

Install all the command-line tools like make, git, etc.

xcode-select --install

Install Homebrew & essential apps

Install homebrew so we can install all the other thigns we’ll need:

/usr/bin/ruby \
    -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

iTerm is my terminal of choice:

brew cask install iterm2

Install a few things from the app store

1Password. I use it for all my credentials

ZSH configuration

Install ZSH completions:

brew install zsh-completions
sudo chown -R $(whoami) /usr/local/share/zsh/site-functions /usr/local/share /usr/local/share/zsh
sudo chmod -R 755 /usr/local/share/zsh/site-functions /usr/local/share /usr/local/share/zsh

Install starship

brew install starship

SSH configuration

Mostly taken from Githubs documentation.

Tell sshd to use the macOS keychain:

echo "Host *
    AddKeysToAgent yes
    UseKeychain yes
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa" > ~/.ssh/config

Generate a new SSH key and add it to your keychain:

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "mads379@gmail.com"
eval "$(ssh-agent -s)"
ssh-add -K ~/.ssh/id_rsa

Tell Github about your new key:

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | pbcopy
open "https://github.com/settings/keys"

Setting up dotfiles

Based on this article.

I use a bare git repostiory in my $HOME folder to track my dotfiler, together with a convenience alias for git named config.

# Set up the bare repository
git clone --bare git@github.com:mads-hartmann/dotfilesv2.git
alias config='/usr/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/dotfilesv2.git/ --work-tree=$HOME'

# Move things to backup directory for review later.
mkdir -p .config-backup && \
config checkout 2>&1 | grep '\t' | awk '{gsub(/\t/,"", $0);print}' | xargs -I{} sh -c 'mkdir -p ".config-backup/$(dirname "{}")" && mv "{}" ".config-backup/{}"'

# Now checkout the dotfiles
config checkout

Visual Studio Code

Sorry Emacs, I’ve converted:

brew cask install visual-studio-code

I have a few extensions that I definitely need:

code --install-extension \
  EditorConfig.EditorConfig \
  letrieu.expand-region \
  eamodio.gitlens

The rest of the configuration lives in my dotfiles, so they should already be in place.

Other essential apps

There’s few tools I usually always use:

# common gnu utilities. Almost certainly needed for bash scripts that run on Linux (CI).
brew install coreutils

And some other ones:

Alfred. I use this as an app launcher, dictionary, clipboard manager.
TaskPaper
BetterSnapTool
TablePlus

Please let this be the final version. ↩