BluePlum's dotfiles

Sup. This repository is representative of my personal configuration files (available here at https://github.com/antonw51/dotfiles).

Feel free to look at, pick and choose, fork, or do whatever you want with these. That's kind of the point.

See what I consider my dotfiles to be at the Preferences section

Installation

NixOS

This entire repository is representative of a /etc/nixos directory for use with NixOS. Installing these dotfiles is hence easiest on NixOS.

To do so, you'll need git, your favorite editor and the root priviliges for your system. (For a bare NixOS system nix-shell suffices:)

$ nix-shell -p git

Clone this repository into a folder that's ideally owned by your user account rather than root (or just use sudo for the following steps). Then copy its contents into the /etc/nixos directory.

# Remove existing configuration
$ [ -f /etc/nixos/configuration.nix ]
    && sudo rm /etc/nixos/configuration.nix 

$ git clone https://github.com/antonw51/dotfiles ~/dotfiles
$ sudo cp -r ~/dotfiles/* /etc/nixos

You will also need to make a .env.nix file for device specific configuration. nixos-rebuild build will tell you which keys need to be filled out, but the current minimal config looks like (/etc/nixos/.env.nix):

{ ... }:

{
    hostname = "pinklilac"
}

[!INFO]

This .env.nix file configures some keys shared across the configuration. Namely this hostname property which declares system.networking.hostname and adds a nix file at /etc/nixos/{hostname}.nix (where {hostname} is your hostname) to configuration.nix module imports.

With this you can configure per-device specifics, such as displays, or additional configuration. See blueplum.nix for an example.

Thereafter you can run sudo nixos-rebuild boot to build the configuration and reboot to apply it appropriately.

If you forked or own the repository and want to cleanly keep the git repository seperated from write-protected /etc/ files to commit to the repository, you can move the git file and .git directories contents to another more permanent directory:

# In this example, the persistent directory will be ~/dev/nixos

$ mkdir -p ~/dev/nixos
$ mv -r ~/dotfiles/.git/* ~/dev/nixos
$ mv ~/dotfiles/git ~/dev/nixos && chmod +x ~/dev/nixos/git

# Optionally remove the originally cloned directory:
$ rm -r ~/dotfiles # git metadata is preserved.

Then use the git executable (with fish) in the new directory to interact with the repository held in /etc/nixos:

$ cd ~/dev/nixos
$ ./git add .
$ ./git commit
$ ./git push
# ...

Other

NixOS allows for reproducible and easily configurable configuration files both system- and user-wide. It makes the installation process a lot easier.

Without NixOS to manage your system, you'll have to configure and "generate" configs yourself. For most things, git, i3, and packages alike this consists of essentially translating the contents of files such as home.nix or home/i3.nix into equivilant configuration.

However, program configurations within the pkgs directory don't have this constraint, as they're defined as traditional configs and then simply copied. These you can copy or symlink to quickly set up the appropriate software. (For instance, to set up Fish, you can link pkgs/fish to your local $__fish_config_dir.)

If you choose this approach, set up symlinks, and want to commit/contribute to the git repository contained within the dotfiles, you may do so within the cloned repository; no need to move anything or use any special git scripts.

Preferences

While I don't necessarily follow any specific ideologies when making/modifying my dotfiles, I do typically:

• Try and keep things to essentials (not minimalistic, but nothing overkill)
• Personally familiar (keyboard shortcuts might not be to your liking)
• With some expansion in mind (.env.nix for example)
• Somewhat consistent (The IBM Carbon colors are currently a personal favorite of mine)
• Formatted and linted consistently (Lua, Nix, and Fish files are all formatted, and I try to keep them up to high, consistent standard)
• Ephermeral (I won't live forever, duh, and this ain't a group project)
• Somewhat informational? (You're reading this README, afterall)
• Redacted (You won't find sensitive things here, perhaps outside of my name, which is rather obvious already)
• Fine-tuned (Irks, even minor I do my best to iron out while trying to keep away from hacky patches)