My dotfiles story (wip)
link to my dotfiles: https://github.com/mudiarto/dotfiles
I love to tinker with my environment, since I love playing with shiny tools, and hopefully to increase my productivity.
I have a growing collections of cli tools, scripts, and configurations that I have been building over the years, but they are not very organized. They are also in private repository so it is a bit hard to pull when I work on new environment.
I want to make it more organized, and make it public so I can use it across different machines. I want to make my computer setup like cattle, not pets.
This is my current dotfiles repository in github. I will try to document the process/thoughts of how I setup my dotfiles here while I’m rebuilding it from scratch.
Tools used
chezmoi
I used to manage my dotfiles using stow, but it is a bit hard to manage with different machines and OS. It seems that chezmoi is trying to solve this problem. I will give it a try.
xonsh
I used to use zsh, but I never comfortable doing scripting in it. I want to experiment with xonsh as my shell, since it is python based, and seems to be more powerful & flexible.
The interesting things about xonsh is that it has 2 modes, python mode and shell mode. My initial confusion is to differentiate which mode it is in, and also the string manipulation between python and shell mode.
Once I got the hang of it, I really enjoy using it.
Couple notes/issues that I encountered:
- Install it using mamba to have a stable installation that doesn’t depend on OS
- Mutagen sync issue because of anything printed during startup in xonsh will be returned to ssh, which cause this issue: “mutagen Error: server handshake failed: unable to receive client magic number: EOF”
- VI mode give this error when I cut something in command line:
Pyperclip could not find a copy/paste mechanism for your system.
- the reason it happens is because I run xonsh remotely via ssh, and there is no X11 window to use as clipboard.
- I tried couple things (including installing Xquartz in my mac) which didn’t solve the issue
- My solution is to disable the clipboard