dotfiles

Just show me the code.

I recently decided it was time to give my dotfiles an early spring-clean and upgrade. While doing so, I felt compelled to write up an explanation of what remained. That explanation is below.

Foundations

I use Z shell and macOS’s default Terminal app. Stumbling upon Ben Kuhn’s 2015 exposition on autocomplete a couple of months ago helped me to feel vindicated in my choices.

I’ll probably be using GitHub Copilot on the command line before the urge to switch to fish gets the better of me.

Setup

set-up.sh attempts to install the necessary dependencies for my dotfiles to work:

#!/bin/zsh

set -e -o pipefail

echo "Installing fonts…"
brew tap homebrew/cask-fonts
brew install --cask font-jetbrains-mono-nerd-font
osascript -e "tell application \"Terminal\" to set the font name of window 1 to \"JetBrainsMono Nerd Font\""

echo "Configuring zsh…"
if [ -f ~/.zshrc ]; then
  printf "\nExisting .zshrc found. Quitting auto set up."
  exit 1
else
  echo "Sym-linking .zshrc…"
  ln -s dotfiles/zsh_profile ~/.zshrc
fi

echo "Installing and configuring starship…"
brew install starship
if [ -f ~/.config/starship.toml ]; then
  printf "\nExisting starship.toml found. Quitting auto set up."
  exit 1
else
  echo "Sym-linking starship.toml…"
  ln -s ~/dotfiles/starship.toml ~/.config/starship.toml
fi

Idempotency intended but not guaranteed. For use on macOS. Assumes dotfiles has been cloned to my home directory and that Homebrew has been installed.

Starship

The biggest improvement I’ve noticed was from adding the Starship prompt on top of zsh with some minimal customisation:

add_newline = false

[character]
success_symbol = '[➜](bold green) '
error_symbol = '[✗](bold red) '

[directory]
truncate_to_repo = false

[gcloud]
disabled = true

I have played around with some funkier shell abstractions in the past, but in general I think more customisation leads to more reliance on the specific quirks of my own terminal which leads to less comfort anytime I need to debug something on someone else’s laptop or a remote server. Not to mention increased brittleness. Theo Browne recorded a good video on keeping it simple.

My two favourite Starship features are:

• Git Status
  • It took me a while to get used to the meanings of the icons, but it was worth it
  • My “g”, “s” and “t” keys have seen their usage plummet
  • Being reminded of stashed changes is super useful (I previously found it very easy to forget about them)
• AWS—being able to see, for example, ~ on ☁️ dev (eu-west-2) saves me about three seconds where before I was needlessly re-activating my AWS profile; invaluable

Aliases and functions

I have collected a few aliases and functions over the years. The distinction between the former and the latter categories of shell abstraction is that my functions reference positional arguments, while aliases do not.

I’ve explained a few of the more opinionated ones below.

logs()

function logs() {
  if [ -n "$AWS_PROFILE" ]; then
    saw "$1" /aws/elasticbeanstalk/api-"$2"/var/log/eb-docker/containers/eb-current-app/stdouterr.log "${@:3}"
  else
    echo "AWS_PROFILE is not set - set it to the environment you want to view logs for"
  fi
}

At Surgery Hero we have a single backend server running on Elastic Beanstalk. logs() just wraps the great saw project by Tyler Brock to simplify fetching logs from CloudWatch.

Example usage:

logs watch dev
logs get dev --start -1h

I’m looking forward to rewriting this once our architecture evolves into something more complex.

delete_branch()

function delete_branch() {
  echo -e "Deletes a branch both locally and remotely or prunes local reference if it has already been deleted from remote\n"

  echo -e "Assumes \"origin\" as remote alias\n"

  git push -d origin "${1}"
  git branch -d "${1}"
  git branch -r --delete origin/"${1}"
}

This is useful for nuking an old Git branch locally and remotely. This should be used with care!

Example usage:

delete_branch old-branch-that-is-definitely-not-needed-by-anyone-in-the-team

ij

function ij() {
  open -na "IntelliJ IDEA.app" --args "$@"
}

Taken from the official docs. I find this useful for quitting the app completely after I have somehow opened twenty projects and then relaunching it from the command line with the one project I actually care about.

ip and copyip

alias ip="curl ipv4.icanhazip.com"
alias copyip="ip | pbcopy"

ip fetches my IPv4 address.

copyip does the same but also copies result to the macOS clipboard.

gh

alias gh="history | grep"

Grepping terminal history. I find this useful whenever I can’t remember the beginning of a command.

copypwd

alias copypwd="pwd | pbcopy"

For whenever using the mouse to select the current directory path feels like too much effort.

Other configuration

I have some manual configuration that aids my work but that isn’t checked into my dotfiles project.

Git

I have two folders for Git-controlled projects: ~/surgeryhero and ~/personal. I have used some config to tell Git which identity with which to sign commits.

~/.gitconfig:

# default to Surgery Hero config
[include]
  path = ~/.gitconfig.surgeryhero

# when working on personal projects
[includeIf "gitdir:**/personal/**/.git"]
  path = ~/.gitconfig.personal

[gpg]
	program = gpg
[commit]
	gpgSign = true
[init]
	templatedir = ~/.git_template
[core]
    hooksPath = ~/surgeryhero/match
[filter "lfs"]
	clean = git-lfs clean -- %f
	smudge = git-lfs smudge -- %f
	process = git-lfs filter-process
	required = true

Where ~/.gitconfig/surgeryhero is:

[user]
  name = Blair Nangle
  email = blair@surgeryhero.com
  signingkey = AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

And ~/.gitconfig.personal is:

[user]
  name = Blair Nangle
  email = hi@blairnangle.com
  signingkey = BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB

This allows me to use different email addresses and GPG keys to sign Surgery Hero and personal commits.

Apologies to anyone whose code I have borrowed and failed to credit! Some of my dotfile config has been around for a long time and its provenance has been lost to the mists of time.