Mechanical Fish's Dotfiles

There are many dotfiles in the world, but these are mine.

These were composed for Mac OS X, originally for Snow Leopard. They are now in use under Mountain Lion and are being gradually modified.

Installing

The dotfiles are manged with the Ansible configuration manager.

• Install Ansible. On the Mac the best plan is to first install Homebrew and then type brew install ansible.

• Type make check, or simply make, shows a list of the changes that ansible-playbook wants to make, rather than actually overwriting any files. (I do this now and then to make sure I haven't edited a dotfile directly.)

• make install to make Ansible install the dotfile templates into my home directory.

• make facts spits out a JSON structure of helpful variables that can be used to parameterize my templates.

Obvious caveats

These are my personal Unix setup files. Using someone else's Unix setup is like borrowing their clothes: It won't fit quite right. There are tools you won't use in here. There are crazy hacks in here. There are crufty broken hacks in here. There are bizarre personal preferences in here.

You're probably better off just picking and choosing individual lines from individual config files.

Contact

• The Mechanical Robot Fish blog.