Zero home presence dotfiles

License

WTFPL

There are many like it, but this one is mine

This repository contains tools and configs I use in shell. No graphical stuff, usable both on server and personal workstation. Battle tested on macOS and various Linux distributions including Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS and even WSL.

I'm a big fan of XDG Base Directory Specification and organize my dotfiles in a way that they don't clutter the $HOME. I was able to reduce files required to be in $HOME to single .zshenv, everything else goes under standard XDG paths or launched via aliases. Additionally if you have root permissions, you can install dotfiles with zero home presence.

Features

• Extensive Zsh configuration and plugins:
  • powerline10k prompt stylized like pure
  • additional completions
  • async autosuggestions plugin
  • syntax highlighting plugin
  • autoenv plugin
  • autopair plugin
  • clean zsh implementation of z
• Vim configuration and plugins
• Tmux configuration and plugins
• Other configs:
  • Midnight Commander
  • ranger
  • quilt
  • Git
  • htop
• Handy utilities:
  • fzf
  • spark to draw bar charts right in the console
  • diff-so-fancy for much better git diff layout
  • git-extras additional helpers for Git
• goenv, jenv, luaenv, nodenv, phpenv, plenv, pyenv and rbenv

Installation

Requirements:

• zsh 5.1 or newer (async stuff requires recent enough version of zsh)
• git (all external components are added as git submodules)

Recommended:

• make (optional: required to install git helpers)
• perl (optional: used by diff-so-fancy)
• python3 and pip3 (optional: used by several vim plugins, but they won't be activated, if vim built without python3 support)
• fd or ag (optional: will be used in fzf by default, if present)

Dotfiles can be installed in any dir, but probably somewhere under $HOME. Personally I use $HOME/.local/dotfiles. The installation is pretty simple:

git clone https://github.com/z0rc/dotfiles.git "$HOME/.local/dotfiles"
$HOME/.local/dotfiles/deploy.zsh
chsh -s /bin/zsh

Deployment script helps to set up all required symlinks after the initial clone. Also it adds cron job to pull updates every midnight and serves as a post-merge git hook, so you don't have to care about updating submodules after successful pull.

In case of missing python or ruby, they can be installed via pyenv and rbenv after the deployment.

Zero home presence

It's possible to install dotfiles without creating ~/.zshenv symlink. In order to do so, there should be an environment variable ZDOTDIR set to <installation dir>/zsh, e.g. $HOME/.local/dotfiles/zsh. This variable should be set super early in login process, before zsh starts sourcing user's .zshenv. One possible option is to add

export ZDOTDIR="$HOME/.local/dotfiles/zsh"

into /etc/zsh/zshenv. Or you can do it with PAM env module.

Vim version

Vim 8.0 or higher is required as plugins are configured via native package interface available in mentioned version. In order you use all bundled vim plugins, please install vim with python3 and ruby support built-in.

Debian/Ubuntu:

apt install vim-nox

CentOS/RHEL/Fedora:

dnf install vim-enhanced

MacOS:

brew install vim

Configuration

Git configuration

Update ~/.config/git/local/user with your email and name. Something like this:

[user]
    email = [email protected]
    name = John Doe

Also you can put additional configuration in ~/.config/git/local/stuff.

Zsh configuration

Keep in mind that Zsh configuration skips every global configuration file except /etc/zsh/zshenv.

You can add your local configuration into $ZDOTDIR/env.d/9[0-9]_* and $ZDOTDIR/rc.d/9[0-9]_*. The difference is that env.d is sourced always while rc.d is sourced in interactive session only.

Also $ZDOTDIR/.zlogin and $ZDOTDIR/.zlogout are available for modifications, albeit missing by default.

Vim configuration

Add your local configuration to $DOTFILES/vim/vimrc.local.

Local paths

Local binaries can be put into $HOME/.local/bin, it's added to PATH by default. Also man pages can be put into $XDG_DATA_HOME/man.

Lazy *env

Pyenv and similar wrappers are lazy-loaded, it means that they won't be initialized on shell start. Activation is done on the first execution. Check out output of type -f pyenv in shell and implementation. Also this means, that files like .python-version won't work as expected, it's recommended to use autoenv.zsh to explicitly activate needed environment.

Ignore config files changes locally

Midnight Commander is quite volatile in terms of writing to its configuration file. Running mc using different screen size results in updating panel size value in mc.ini. Same goes with htop. In order to ignore local changes to configuration files you can do:

git update-index --assume-unchanged configs/mc.ini

To restore git tracking of those files use:

git update-index --no-assume-unchanged configs/mc.ini