#dotfiles

My personal configuration files. I've put effort into making my setup reasonably modular and portable. So far it's been tested on Arch GNU+Linux, MacOS, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD.

The information in this file is probably out of date.

#Management

I manage these as a farm of symlinks using GNU Stow. Each directory (or package) contains a number of files or directories for which stow creates corresponding links in my home directory. For example:

% cd dotfiles/
% ls -A shells/
.profile .shrc
% stow -t ~ shells
% ls -la ~
<snip>
<snip> .profile -> dotfiles/shells/.profile
<snip> .shrc -> dotfiles/shells/.shrc
<snip>

#Contents

I sometimes like to reorganise this repository for fun, so this might not be accurate:

• shells/ A Rube-Goldberg shell configuration, see below. Why I didn't put this directory in base/ is a mystery to me.
• base/ Configurations that don't explicitly depend on a graphical user interface. I keep these separate from GUI to make it easier to use machines that I don't have as much control over.
• gui/ Configurations for X11, various window managers, and explicitly graphical programs.

#Commentary

#XDG Base Directory Bigotry

I keep a clean ~. A significant portion of my shell configuration is dedicated to telling wayward programs to look for their files in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME.

#A Note on Shells

I have a kinda cool but also really dumb polyglot shell configuration.

The file ~/.profile is read at login by the Korn shell and the Bourne shell. It primarily contains portable environment declarations that I think should work on any Posix-superset shell. Because ~/.profile is only read by ksh and sh, if $SHELL is set to bash or zsh the symlink should be renamed accordingly:

% [ $(basename $SHELL) = zsh ] && mv .profile .zprofile
% [ $(basename $SHELL) = bash ] && mv .profile .bash_profile

The file ~/.shrc is a weird multi-shell polyglot file that is run in non-login shells. For sh and ksh it is set as the value of the $ENV variable and ran. For bash and zsh the symlink should be renamed:

% [ $(basename $SHELL) = zsh ] && mv .shrc .zshrc
% [ $(basename $SHELL) = bash ] && mv .shrc .bashrc

This works perfectly for zsh and OpenBSD ksh, and require some tweaks under bash. It sort-of works for dash and FreeBSD's /bin/sh, though those require more work. At some point I'll test it with Busybox's ash and the other Korn shells like pdksh and mksh.

Note that this won't work with shells like csh, tcsh, Plan 9 rc, Nu, and Fish that aren't derived directly from the Bourne Shell.

#Emacs Tweaks

I keep my Emacs config in ~/.config/emacs instead of ~/.emacs.d, which only works for version >27. To work with older versions of Emacs a symlink is required:

ln -s ~/.emacs.d ~/.config/emacs

I like to use Emacs for weird things like email and pdf previews of LaTeX documents, so my configuration relies on some external packages like imagemagick, texlive, gpg, pass, and mu4e.

My configuration heavily depends on melpa packages like AucTeX and Evil Mode, so M-x package-refresh-contents and M-x package-install-selected-packages are required.

Additionally, in order to do email in emacs I need things that I don't keep in this repository like my password-store and external programs like protonmail-bridge.

#neo(vim)

I prefer neovim to vim, but I think this configuration should work with plain old vim provided that ~/.profile exists with $VIMINIT set to the right file.

#X Stuff

Because I'm a pathological WM hopper and I keep my things under git, the bulk of my X configuration (programs I want started and stuff) live in the file symlinked to by ~/.xprofile. This is called by ~/.xinitrc, just before the exec foo directive. I really need to figure out a better way of doing that. The ly display manager with it's DOOM-like ansi flames looks promising.

I'm hoping that FVWM holds a cure for my addiction.

I haven't been memed into switching to Wayland yet, but if/when I do I'll have to figure out a way of automatically calling/filtering ~/.xprofile.

Xresources and stuff live in ~/.config/xresources, which may be an issue for some programs. I haven't encountered any though.

#Freedesktop S&!t

The XDG utils and specifications are generally stupid and obtuse, so my configurations for URL scheme handlers and default applications are probably fragile.