Dotfiles

Elegant dotfiles that are simple to understand and modify.

Preface

These are some of the dotfiles I use on my Arch Linux and macOS environments. An effort has been made to apply programming best practices to keep these dotfiles organized, simple, and easy to read. The dotfiles are also commented so they may be used as references or inspiration when creating personal configurations.

Overview

• General
  • Bash (~/.bashrc) - default terminal shell
  • Zsh (~/.zshrc) - better version of bash
  • Neovim (~/.vimrc) - text editor
  • Tmux (~/.tmux.conf) - terminal multiplexer
  • Git (~/.gitconfig & ~/.gitignore) - version control system
• Linux
  • XMonad (~/.xmonad/xmonad.hs) - tiling window manager
  • Xmobar (~/.config/xmobar/xmobarrc) - status bar
  • Kitty (~/.config/kitty/kitty.conf) - terminal emulator
  • Rofi (~/.config/rofi/config.rasi) - application launcher
  • Dunst (~/.config/dunst/dunstrc) - notification daemon
• Miscellaneous
  • Font: FiraCode Nerd Font
  • Colorscheme: Solarized
  • GTK Theme: Numix Solarized
  • Icon Theme: Papirus

Screenshots

Here we see xmonad in tiling mode with window gaps, xmobar on top, and five kitty windows on zsh with transparency running neofetch, gotop, asciiquarium, cmatrix, and pipes.sh.

Here we see xmonad with floating windows containing emacs, lxappearance, dunst, rofi, vifm, and kitty containing a neovim instance inside a tmux session.

Features

• Bash
  • default shell for most operating systems
  • use zsh instead of bash whenever possible
• Zsh
  • improved version of bash with better defaults and customization options
  • zinit plugin manager with fastest startup time compared to zplug, zgen, and antigen
  • fish-style syntax highlighting with zsh-syntax-highlighting
  • improved reverse history search with history-search-multi-word
  • better ls aliases with exa
  • substring completions using zstyle completion system
  • colored man pages
  • displays error code in right prompt
• Neovim
  • vim-plug plugin manager faster than Vundle and pathogen
  • coc.nvim for LSP, linting, formatting, completion, and snippet support
  • improved status bar with lightline.vim
  • file explorer support with coc-explorer
  • backwards compatibility with vim
• Tmux
  • tpm plugin manager
  • true color support
  • status bar indicates if prefix key is pressed or not
  • shared clipboard between system, terminal emulator, tmux, and neovim with tmux-yank
  • saves tmux environment to allow for a complete restoration after a system restart with tmux-resurrect
• Git
  • most common version control system compared with hg and svn
  • uses hub, extension to command-line git
  • aliases for commonly run git and hub commands
  • prettier log and reflog aliases
  • global .gitignore file applied to all git repositories
• XMonad
  • dynamic window manager configured in Haskell and an alternative to desktop environments
  • uses XMonad.Util.EZConfig for keybindings for enhanced readability
  • adjustable screen and window gaps
  • sends internal state information to xmobar with XMonad.Hooks.DynamicLog
  • multi-monitor support with xmobar
• Xmobar
  • status bar most commonly used with xmonad
  • displays xmonad information such as workspaces, layout, window count, and window title
  • uses monitor plugins to display information such as RAM/CPU usage and more
• Kitty
  • fast, cross-platform, GPU-accelerated terminal emulator
  • default ligature support
  • replaces xterm
• Rofi
  • drop-in dmenu replacement with additional features
  • also functions as a window switcher and ssh launcher
  • run in combi mode to allow several modes to be merged into one list
  • includes a calculator mode and an emoji mode
• Dunst
  • lightweight replacement for the notification-daemons provided by most desktop environments
  • includes dunstify, an alternative to notify-send with more features like IDs and actions

Installation

These instructions are for Arch Linux distributions. I use yay to install AUR packages. For macOS, replacing pacman -S with brew install will generally work, assuming you have brew installed.

Zsh

pacman -S zsh
sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zdharma/zinit/master/doc/install.sh)"

After reloading the shell, run zinit self-update to update zinit and zinit update --all to update plugins.

To set zsh as your default shell, run chsh -s `which zsh` and reset your computer.

Optional utilities:

pacman -S exa hub

You may want to set up a personal access token so hub can access the GitHub API.

Neovim

For backwards compatibility, we first set up vim then neovim.

pacman -S vim
curl -fLo ~/.vim/autoload/plug.vim --create-dirs \
  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/junegunn/vim-plug/master/plug.vim

Run :PlugInstall to install plugins, :PlugUpdate to update plugins, and :PlugUpgrade to update vim-plug.

pacman -S neovim python-neovim xclip

# symlink config directories
mkdir -p ~/.config
ln -s ~/.vim ~/.config/nvim
ln -s ~/.vimrc ~/.config/nvim/init.vim

Run :checkhealth and follow the instructions to install the providers. Run :PlugInstall and :UpdateRemotePlugins to install neovim plugins.

Additional steps for plugins:

# coc.nvim
pacman -S nodejs

# vimtex
pacman -S texlive-most zathura zathura-pdf-mupdf xdotool python-pip
pip install neovim-remote

# vim-instant-markdown
pacman -S xdg-utils
yarn global add instant-markdown-d

Tmux

pacman -S tmux
git clone https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tpm ~/.tmux/plugins/tpm

Run <prefix> I to install plugins and <prefix> U to update plugins.

Others

• Bash: pacman -S bash
• Git: pacman -S git openssh
• XMonad: pacman -S xmonad xmonad-contrib
• Xmobar: pacman -S xmobar
• Kitty: pacman -S kitty xterm
• Rofi: pacman -S rofi rofi-calc dmenu && yay -S rofi-emoji
• Dunst: pacman -S dunst libnotify
• Font: yay -S nerd-fonts-fira-code
• GTK Theme: yay -S gtk-theme-numix-solarized
• Icon Theme: pacman -S papirus-icon-theme

Note that xterm and dmenu are not required but some programs may use them as default programs. If you want to use ssh keys for git, you will need openssh. The rofi-calc and rofi-emoji packages are plugins that add modes to rofi.

Other utilities that I use but don't have dotfiles for in this repository and might be worth mentioning include emacs (text editor), picom (compositor), vifm (file manager), sxiv (image viewer), nitrogen (wallpaper setter), and pass (password manager).

More utilities that I use include ripgrep, htop, bat, scrot, neofetch, rofi-pass, and arandr. Some fun ones include gotop, cmatrix, pipes.sh, and asciiquarium.

Command/Keybinding Reference

Pacman/Yay Commands

pacman -Syu               # upgrade repo packages
pacman -S <package-name>  # install package from the Arch repositories
yay                       # upgrade AUR packages
yay -S <package-name>     # install package from the AUR

Zsh Commands

zinit self-update     # update zinit
zinit update --all    # update zsh plugins
zinit delete --clean  # delete removed zinit plugins

Neovim Commands

:PlugUpgrade          # update vim-plug
:PlugInstall          # install vim plugins
:PlugUpdate           # update vim plugins
:PlugClean            # delete removed vim plugins
:UpdateRemotePlugins  # update remote neovim plugins
:checkhealth          # run neovim healthchecks

Tmux Keybindings

<prefix> I    # install tmux plugins
<prefix> U    # update tmux plugins
<prefix> M-u  # delete removed tmux plugins
<prefix> C-s  # save tmux resurrect session
<prefix> C-r  # restore tmux resurrect session

Additional Remarks

This repository is meant to simply be a collection of dotfiles for people to look through and pick out things they like for their own dotfiles. It is not meant to be a dotfile management system or a strict configuration that I recommend everyone to follow. As such, there is no installation script since that would defeat the purpose and intent of this repository. For an elegant way to store dotfiles, consider using a bare repository. Users are expected to manually inspect and customize each dotfile. For this reason, specific aliases or keybindings are not explicitly mentioned in the descriptions. Furthermore as a matter of personal taste, excellent utilities worth mentioning such as oh-my-zsh, fzf, and pywal are not included to keep things simple.

Contributing

Please feel free to contribute in any way that you would like. If you find a bug or have any questions, report it. Contributions through pull requests are also welcome.