Time for a New Dotfile Setup

Currently, I have all my dotfiles hosted in a private repo on Github. Unfortunately, the way I have them setup is not very straightforward, and since it has sensitive information in it, I haven’t been able to make it public. I know I could sanitize it, but I’m sure there are better ways to handle dotfiles out there.

I’ve pondered writing my own setup, but I’ve also found some pretty solid setups on Github. One in particular by skwp is very extensive.  He refers to is as YADR, or Yet Another Dotfile Repo. According to the repo, he’s been working on it since 2011 and it really shows.  I’m going to fork it and test it for a week or so.

Installation

The YADR repository is setup to be installed on Mac OS, however, I plan to run it on Linux — specifically Ubuntu 16.04.  I will also try it on Centos 7 as we run RHEL and Centos at work.  I’ll also try to post any hiccups encountered with using Terminator.

I found this web page that talks about changes that need to be made for YADR’s repo to work on Linux.  It was posted back in 2014, so I don’t know if the information is still current. So far I know I had to do most of the things he outlined in the After installing YADR section (setting Terminator background, fonts).

Missing prereqs

Maybe I overlooked it, but I think there were some prerequisites that skwp assumed you had installed.  While the script did a lot, I don’t think it checked if zsh was installed — I had to install it manually. Also, ruby and rake might not be installed on your distro.

To be continued

I will be adding more to this soon…