Dotfiles

What are Dotfiles?

Nothing special, really. Configuration files in Linux distributions often start with a dot, which is why the collection of these files is called “dotfiles”. Unlike Windows, where such configurations are often stored in the registry, dotfiles are just plain text files — easy to read, edit and transfer between machines.

How to keep them in sync? Host them in Git.

The challenge is keeping your dotfiles consistent across different Linux machines.

Git is the best tool for this. Besides being an HTTPS-accessible storage, you also get versioning for free.

First, it’s important to organise your dotfiles in a structured way.

GitHub itself has collected some good arguments for why dotfiles belong on GitHub: https://dotfiles.github.io/

The Project: Cleaning up Dotfiles

So I started revising, organising and committing my dotfiles to a Git repo.

My dotfiles are here: https://github.com/rebelmc/.dotfiles

Getting a new machine up to standard

Now it’s easy to pull the dotfiles from Git:

git clone https://github.com/rebelmc/.dotfiles.git ~/.config/dotfiles
~/.config/dotfiles/bootstrap.sh

A small optimisation: One-liner

That felt like too many steps, so I built a one-liner:

curl https://www.curth.de/nice-console | bash

And there’s my prompt with all tools included…

…looks pretty good, right? :-)

Future extensions

Now it’s about extending the config further. Vim and Tmux are still missing — I haven’t quite decided how much customisation I want there yet.