My dotfiles

Your dotfiles are how you personalize your system. This repo contains mine. ps: This is focused on MacOS. Try this at your own risk.

If you're interested in the philosophy behind why projects like these are awesome, you might want to read holman's post on the subject.

What this does

Sets up a development machine from a fresh macOS install.

• Installs desktop apps from the Brewfile: iTerm2 and Warp, VS Code and Cursor, Arc, Chrome, Firefox, Slack, Discord, Zoom, Linear, Notion, Figma, Claude, 1Password, Raycast, Docker Desktop, Postman, Charles, Spotify, plus powerline fonts. App Store apps (WhatsApp, Pages, Keynote, Xcode) come from BrewfileAppStore.

• Installs command line tools from the same Brewfile: git, gh, fnm (node), yarn, ripgrep, fzf, jq, bat, ffmpeg, imagemagick, watchman, wget, zsh with autosuggestions, completions and syntax highlighting, and oh-my-zsh.

• Sets macOS defaults such as key repeat, tap to click and menu bar battery %. See the file for the full list.

• Sets aliases for all kinds of things. Look for the aliases.zsh files to check them.

Topical

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 script/bootstrap.

Components

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/path.zsh: Any file named path.zsh is loaded first and is expected to setup $PATH or similar.
• topic/completion.zsh: Any file named completion.zsh is loaded last and is expected to setup autocomplete.
• topic/install.sh: Any file named install.sh is executed when you run script/install. To avoid being loaded automatically, its extension is .sh, not .zsh.
• topic/*.symlink: Any file ending in *.symlink gets 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 script/bootstrap.

Install

ps: If you want to install this with your own customizations, skip this section.

Sign in to the App Store first (the App Store apps install through mas, which cannot sign in for you), then run:

sh -c "`curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/yannbf/dotfiles/master/start.sh `"

That installs the Xcode Command Line Tools if missing, clones this repo to ~/.dotfiles, symlinks the dotfiles into your home directory, installs Homebrew and everything in the Brewfiles, runs each topic's install.sh (oh-my-zsh, node through fnm, iTerm2 settings) and offers to set the macOS defaults. Expect a few password prompts along the way (Homebrew, casks, changing the shell).

Everything is configured and tweaked within ~/.dotfiles.

dot is a simple script that installs some dependencies, sets sane macOS defaults, and so on. Tweak this script, and occasionally run dot from time to time to keep your environment fresh and up-to-date. You can find this script in bin/.

Install with my own customization

If you want to strip out or add more things to your setup, you might want to fork this repo first, remove what you don't need, tweak with which applications you want installed in the brewfile, along with other config files with the extension .zsh.

Once you do that, then just run script/bootstrap.

ps: To better understand the flow of the scripts, check script/bootstrap, script/install, bin/dot and zsh/zshrc.symlink (where the zsh files are run)

Adding new apps

When using homebrew/cask/mas, if you need to add a new application or tool, just go to the Brewfile (for CLI and UI tools) and BrewfileAppStore (for app store apps) and add a new entry there. After doing that, run brew-update and you're set!

Thanks

I forked Zach Holman's excellent dotfiles and customized it for my own needs.