They’re files that store the settings to configure your different apps
Usually kept in a repository to reproduce the changes across devices
I keep my settings for alacritty, tmux, karabiner, brew, starship, zsh, etc
https://github.com/linkarzu/dotfiles-latest
In the video you will see I use my old and now unmaintained dotfiles-public repo.
The repo that is now maintained and up to date is dotfiles-latest.
All the commands in the blogpost are updated and point to the newdotfiles-latest repo.
If you encounter any issues or outdated parts, let me know
What are repositories?
Repositories are essentially online storage spaces where you can keep and manage various configuration files and scripts. Repos can be stored on platforms like Github, GitLab, Bitbucket, etc. You can easily track any changes made to these files over time, share them with others, or synchronize them across multiple devices.
If you’re new to this, think of Github as a Google Drive, but for code
Importance of the .zshrc file
Every time you open your terminal application, if using zsh as you shell , which is the default in macos, the ~/.zshrc file is executed
You can check what your current shell is with echo $SHELL
Also every time you source the .zshrc file, you execute it.
This matters because I use my zshrc file as a master file to update the rest of the local computer dotfiles, so every time I open my terminal, if there were changes in any of my dotfiles in github, they will be applied locally on my computer
Clone the dotfiles
We need to configure each one of the apps we installed on the earlier video for doing that, we’ll be using my dotfiles, as I already have working settings in the repository
To get those settings to your local computer, you need to clone my repo
NOTE: Instead of cloning the repo, I highly recommend you to fork it, that way if I make changes in the future, they won’t be applied to you automatically
I’ll briefly show you how to fork in the video.
Sign in to github (if you don’t have an account create one)
Go to my dotfiles repo https://github.com/linkarzu/dotfiles-latest
Click on fork
If you don’t want to fork the repo, its kind of fine, you can also clone directly and I’ll show you how to disable automatic updates
First, we will create the directory where we will store different github repos I like keeping repos in the directory below
And then move (cd) into that directory
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mkdir-p ~/github
cd ~/github/
Then clone the repo to that created directory
To run this git clone command, we need to have git installed, which we already installed on an earlier video
cloning the repo, basically copies all the files in github, to my computer
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git clone <REPO_URL>
After cloning the repo, we need to replace your existing zshrc configuration with my zshrc file
This will take care of all the caveats for the apps we installed with brew on an earlier video, so that all of our apps work properly
You can open and inspect the zshrc-file.sh file in the repo. But we will go over what each section does in later videos
The first command below will back up your .zshrc file first, in case you want to revert back to those settings in in the future.
The second command replaces your .zshrc file with a symlink (shortcut) that points to the .zshrc file stored in the repo files we cloned
If the file already exists it will be replaced, but remember, we automatically back it up first
-n allows the link to be treated as a normal file if it is a symlink that points to a directory
-f “force” overwrites without warning if it already exists
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# Create a backup of the existing ~/.zshrc file# If the original ~/.zshrc file does not exist, nothing will happencp ~/.zshrc ~/.zshrc_backup_$(date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S)>/dev/null 2>&1
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# To see the created backup
lla ~
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# Create the symlink to point .zshrc to the file in my dotfiles-latest repoln-snf ~/github/dotfiles-latest/zshrc/zshrc-file.sh ~/.zshrc
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# To see the created symlink
lla ~
Now that the .zshrc file has been replaced, we need to apply the changes in the new file with the below command
The prompt will change
if you do an ls you’ll also see colors
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source ~/.zshrc
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# To see all the files that were updated
lla ~
We will go over the dotfiles, and see how I use each one of the applications configured in the next videos
For now, lets switch to the Alacritty terminal app
I’ll explain what Alacritty is, why I use it, and how to configure it in the alacritty video
If you cloned my repo directly instead of forking, comment the auto update lines, demo in the video
Community-driven promotion
Do you want to promote yourself in my channel? I’m not talking about a company like notion, brilliant, and all those other ones we’re using to seeing. I’m talking about you as a person, do you have a project, course, youtube channel or product and trying to reach an audience?
If interested, pricing and all the details can be found in this other page
You’re a fraud, why do you ask for money, isn’t YouTube Ads enough?
I explain all of this in the “about me page” link below:
