Git, Dotfiles, and the Dream of a Truly Cross-Platform Work Environment

So last October I started using Git to track my dotfiles and config files. Although it makes sense to use version control in case you make a change that breaks your system, to me the biggest appeal of doing this was so that I could easily synchronize all my config files between devices. My first commit included config files for npm and vim, and now it’s grown to include bash, window managers, and terminal emulators.

The Problem

At first I wasn’t sure how to track the files. Looking around on Github, a lot of coders, including the eminent tpope, seemed to just git init their home directory, and then git add each file they wanted to track. This seemed a messy solution, however, and also would not translate well to my different systems (both different software setups and of course different operating systems).

An Elegant Solution for a More Civilized Age

The solution I came up with was to store all the config files which I wanted to track in a separate directory (I chose ~/git/dotfiles) tracked by git. I then symlinked from each tracked file to the location on my system the file was supposed to be (e.g. $ ln -s ~/git/dotfiles/.vimrc ~/.vimrc). This allowed me to git clone the repo safely onto any system, and then choose which individual files I wanted to utilize on that system.

The fact that this solution was cross-platform (I currently use it on my Arch Linux laptop, my OS X desktop, and a headless linux server on the cloud) was very exciting to me. It was a big motivation for me to build up my .vimrc, knowing I could use that setup on any of my systems, including servers I SSH into. I also recently switched to using rxvt-unicode as my Linux terminal emulator of choice. I would call it the terminal emulator equivalent of Vim: lightweight, seemingly minimal at first, but incredibly customizable (and to topic at hand, all through a single text config file). I need to explore setting it up on OS X, but if I did I could have a consistent terminal experience across all my Unix-like devices. Which would be amazing.

A Text-Based Operating System?

The more I switch to using text-based (cross-platform) terminal apps, using config files which I sync on Github, the more I am approaching a text-based, platform independent operating system. Especially for coding, my main tools at the moment are tmux, Neovim/Vim, Git, npm. The only GUI tool is Chrome/Chromium. I can see a future where OS X or Linux are just trivial background platforms. I can see the IT world moving in this direction anyway with projects like Docker and CoreOS.

Teach Me To Code

The next thing I’d like to learn to level up my dotfiles would be to create a node.js text-based script to automate the symlinking of scripts to new systems. I recently discovered the GNU Stow project, which already solves this problem, but I’ve been meaning to learn how to create node.js terminal apps. Another would be to add in platform-specific (i.e. OS X or Linux) settings to certain config files. In particular it would be great if I could use the same bash config files on both platforms. Please let me know if you have any feedback, ideas, or suggestions for me!