Andrew's Dotfiles

These are my personal dotfiles.

curl https://andrew.cloud/dotfiles.sh | bash

These dotfiles are intended for use with zsh, oh-my-zsh, and the solarized colorscheme. The configuration uses powerline-based status bars for vim and tmux and Powerlevel10k as its zsh theme.

Prequisites

These dotfiles contain the following software dependencies:

• Linux or MacOS
• Vim 8.0+ (or Neovim 0.3.1+)

There currently is no Windows support. However, MacOS and most flavors of Linux should work fine.

Setting up your Local Machine

Go to the next section if you have already configured these dotfiles on your machine once, or if you are SSHing into another machine. These setup instructions only need to be done once on a local machine.

New machines require two tasks to be done which are not part of the setup script:

• installing (and using) Powerline/Font Awesome-compatible fonts, and
• using the Solarized colorscheme.

MacOS

Installing Fonts with Custom Glyph Support

We will be using Nerd Fonts to patch in all of our symbols. This font aggregator is nice in the sense that it collects many different glyphs from various sources. (We'll be using a lot of different symbols!)

You'll first want to install a pre-patched font. There are multiple ways to do this. If you prefer to use the browser, download Droid Sans Mono Nerd Font Complete.otf from the Nerd Fonts prepatched fonts folder. Clicking on the file from Finder after downloading it should be sufficient.

Alternatively, if you have Homebrew, you can install it from the command line.

brew tap homebrew/cask-fonts
brew cask install font-droidsansmono-nerd-font

Next, you'll want to configure iTerm to use the new font.

1. Go to the Text tab in your current iTerm profile and select the option to Use a different font for non-ASCII text.
2. In the same tab, select Droid Sans Mono Nerd Font as the font for non-ASCII text.

The Powerline symbols included in the font might not align well. As a remedy, iTerm has a Use built-in Powerline glyphs option to substitute the characters with its own built-in alternative characters. I'd recommend checking that option.

The Text section of my iTerm settings looks like the picture below. For ASCII text, I use Menlo Regular (which is a native font) and use 14pt for all font types.

Solarized on iTerm

The Solarized colors for iTerm can be found in its official repository. Import Solarized Dark.itermcolors as a colorscheme for iTerm. In the Colors section of your iTerm profile, use the Solarized Dark preset.

Enable Copy/Paste in Tmux

On Macs, pbcopy and pbpaste don't natively work in tmux. Luckly there's a Homebrew formula to fix that.

brew install reattach-to-user-namespace

The tmux configuration will do the rest for you. Note that this only applies to machines running MacOS.

Enable Mouse Wheel Scrolling in Vim on iTerm

If using iTerm, setting Scroll wheel sends arrow keys when in alternate screen mode. to Yes will allow trackpad scrolling while in Vim. The setting can be found in the advanced preferences.

Linux

Downloading Fonts for Linux

Similarly to that of MacOS, you'll need to fetch modified fonts. We'll install the same font that we use for MacOS, although setting it up is rather different.

mkdir -p ~/.local/share/fonts
cd ~/.local/share/fonts
# Download the Droid Sans Mono from the latest Nerd Font release.
# We don't download from master due to lack of stability guarantees.
curl -fLo "Droid Sans Mono Nerd Font Complete.otf" \
  https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts/raw/2.0.0/patched-fonts/DroidSansMono/complete/Droid%20Sans%20Mono%20Nerd%20Font%20Complete.otf

After downloading the font, set it to be the font that your terminal apps uses.

Solarized on Ubuntu Terminal

To get Solarized on the Ubuntu Terminal, you will want to create a new profile. Then you will follow the instructions in gnome-terminal-colors-solarized to set the color scheme.

Start by creating a new profile on the terminal emulator.

Set that profile to be the default profile upon terminal open.

Finally clone the gnome-terminal-colors-solarized repo and follow its installation instructions.

git clone https://github.com/Anthony25/gnome-terminal-colors-solarized.git
cd gnome-terminal-colors-solarized
./set_dark.sh

Other optional tools

There are a few recommended (but optional) tools you can install to improve your shell experience in general.

• diff-so-fancy: Diff-so-fancy is a diffing tool that gives a nicer diff than the git default.
• rg: Ripgrep is a faster alternative over ag, ack, and grep. It has the exact same usage as ag and is likely more preferable in all use cases.
• fzf: Fzf is a general purpose fuzzy funder.
• fd: fd is a faster alternative to the find command. It works very well when paired with fzf.
• tree: This will display the directory structure as a tree. We use it to improve the output of ALT-C from fzf.
• bat: An improved version of cat. We use it for the file previews when running CTRL-T from fzf.

You should install all of these independently of this dotfile repo. (This also includes figuring out how to install them.) Most of these are Homebrew packages on MacOS (or a target in most Linux package managers).

Installation

Installation is as simple as downloading and running the install script. The install script will run the configuration script, which fetches oh-my-zsh and symlinks the dotfiles to your home directory.

curl https://andrew.cloud/dotfiles.sh | bash
# or
wget -qO- https://andrew.cloud/dotfiles.sh | bash

Alternatively, you can manually clone the repository and run the configure.sh script.

git clone --depth=1 git@github.com:MrPickles/dotfiles.git ~/.dotfiles
cd ~/.dotfiles
./configure.sh -t build

You will also likely need to manually change your shell to zsh if you are currently using a different shell.

chsh -s $(which zsh)

Vim

We use the vim-plug as our editor plugin manager. When first opening Vim, run the following command.

:PlugInstall

Customizing

You can customize zsh, vim, tmux, and git for each specific machine. Just put any additional configurations in ~/.zshrc.local, ~/.vimrc.local, or ~/.tmux.conf.local. Sample local configs are included in this repo. Custom git configurations can be placed in ~/.gitconfig. The normal git config file is not put under version control, so it's safe to put machine-specific tokens in it.

Teardown

To clean up the dotfiles, run the configuration script with the clean argument. It will remove all symlinks, but zsh and oh-my-zsh will be untouched. If you wish to remove those, you will have to manually delete them.

cd ~/.dotfiles
./configure.sh -t clean
rm -rf ~/.oh-my-zsh # optionally remove oh-my-zsh
chsh -s $(which bash) # optionally change shell back to bash