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Dotfiles feel too personal to share

hamatti.org

111–120 of 153 posts

Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just the internet but communities too. High trust societies are great to live in, digitally and physically. Leave the doors unlocked, leave keys in the ignition, leave valuables on the table when you walk away. But high trust societies only work when the price of ongoing admission is not violating that trust. When you accept/tolerate/expect the violation of trust the doors lock.

... but dude, we're talking about how you configure VI and ... bash. Like... guys. Calm down.

... to follow myself up...

I went ahead and looked in my .vimrc and lo and behold there's a "security issue" in it:

    if $USER != 'root'              " Modelines let you specify format rules for a file within the file
        set modeline modelines=5    "   e.g. "// vim: tabstop=20 : shiftwidth=20" (or something actually reasonable)
    else                            "   They can be a security vulnerability (unlikely) so we don't enable for root
        set nomodeline
    endif
... so yeah... I guess there's some concepts worth being extra sensitive about... but even still, surely y'all can handle this stuff.

Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share

#112
post #76
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly just can't vibe with the "don't customize because you'll log into other servers" thing. To me it feels like getting told to not put nice shelves in my home because other buildings don't have them.

Also, if you have useful nice shelves that make your fridge aka postgres run better, why shouldn't we work on putting that on servers to make all fridges run better? Also, having a comparable and shared admin experience is a big deal in a team. Like sure, if you need to quibble about red or yellow prompts, eh. But if there is a good log colorizer or analyzer that makes an expert better at handling the system, or some…

  > I want this deployed for _all_ admins on _all_ relevant systems.
Another user above mentioned that his most important config is mapping j to gj. That would drive me nuts. When lines are so long that they wrap, I want j to go to the next line, not the next however-wide-the-terminal-is. On the off chance that I ever want that, I have gj right there at my literal fingertips.

You're never going to find a config that everybody is happy with. If that were the case, then there would be no need of config at all.

Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share

#113
post #63
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly just can't vibe with the "don't customize because you'll log into other servers" thing. To me it feels like getting told to not put nice shelves in my home because other buildings don't have them.

"Free and easy That's my style Howdy-do me? Watch me smile But fare-the-well me After a while 'Cause I gotta roam And any place I hang my hat is home"

Burma shave

Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share

#114
post #12

RIGHT? I could MAYBE see it if you were sharing your things on your personal blog -- but "github dotfile repos" feels wildly icky to me.

why? no one cares about your dotfiles 99% of time.

I put all kinds of weird stuff in mine. Where/who I stole the alias from. Maybe some swear words. Broken stuff. Jokey stuff. I don't want people judging me. It's like publishing the worst of your sketch book or something. People just don't need to see it.

Which really annoys me that everything is effectively public at my place of employment. I have to mildly censor myself all the time.

Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share

#115

Installing a (read: many) custom vim plugins and color scheme and screen version and etc… stops being fun about the third time you have to log into a nameless server. That being said, there are some settings that I absolutely cannot live without; `j=gj` being a good example in vim. IMO your dot files are only useful to share if they are usable with the default software of the place you’ve shared them to. Otherwise th…

With neovim, you have pretty good profile copy-ability. The app convention is very nice too, for isolation.

  scp -r mydesktop:.config/my_bespoke_neovim $HOME
  export NVIM_APPNAME=$HOME/.config/my_bespoke_neovim
Using something like astrovim provides a very nice framework for declaratively bringing in and bringing together a very nice environment too. Great start, good patterns, the impressive `lazy` managing plugins under the hood.

Mason is one other core bedrock components of good neovim dx. It's the main library in the neovim galaxy for bringing in lsp servers and debug adapter protocols. It mostly just works, gives great out of box debug-ability. There's like a mini `mise` running, powering the plugins you bring in.

Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share

#116
post #56
post #4

I feel similarly. For me I know it is because of my rejection sensitive dysphoria. The fear of someone seeing and judging something personal of mine is quite uncomfortable. I don't have the same issue with code I write professionally.

> I don't have the same issue with code I write professionally. Why not?

Code I write professionally is polished before I send it for review. Code/dotfiles I write for myself are full of all kinds of heinous hacks.

Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It completely depends on your work environment. My experience has been doing a lot of admin work and working with distributed databases. I probably spend a third of my day in servers that are not mine. So for me it just doesn’t make sense to make a lot of configuration changes, especially changes that will end up in my muscle memory. Now my personal computer does have much nicer color schemes and a few plugins for co…

> Configuring it is starting to get old That's exactly the opposite of my experience. Since all my dotfiles are in Github, configuring new system is just a git clone and copying a few files around. I don't even use any config manager, since I rarely get new computers. Takes a few minutes max per machine (plus maybe package installs like zsh if it's not there already).

> Takes a few minutes max per machine (plus maybe package installs like zsh if it's not there already).

Assuming you have internet and can access GitHub. Setting up internally accessible repos for that or bake it into an image is its own excercise, which you'd have to setup again for every site and isn't there on day 0.

Even so, "a few minutes per machine" builds up quickly if that happens multiple times per day and new airgapped sites are a regular occurence. That's not including the possibly larger cost of context-switching to "customization mode" for every setup.

I do have a few dotfile customizations I carry around for sites/boxes I bother enough with but at this point they're cut down and familiar enough that it takes me a few seconds to put those in place manually from memory and dist defaults.

Minimal .profile:

VISUAL=vim EDITOR=vim

tmux and some other apps will pick up on this and switch to vi-style keybindings.

I resonate with embracing the Zen of leaning into defaults.

Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share

#118
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the main reason that, even though I know I'd enjoy zsh, I stubbornly stick with bash. It's because I know that I will be extra frustrated when I have to log into any of the number of machines that I have to do real work on that don't have it already set up.

That’s like saying: “This is the main reason that, even though I know I’d enjoy a nice car, I stubbornly stick with a run-down PT Cruiser without radio and air conditioning. It’s because I know that I will be extra frustrated when I have to take an Uber.” I personally use zsh and do not want to miss it on my own machines. I however do log in onto machines that sometimes do not even have bash (yeah it’s rare nowadays,…

[deleted]

Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share

#119
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is extremely alarmist. If you are on Mac, developing anything at all with Python, those are going to be your tools. If you randomly guessed at developer setups, that is going to be one of the most common setups as well. What's next, I use a computer so someone could just upload a virus somewhere in hopes I happen upon it, which would be dangerous? I have dotfiles which not only specify Python, but also its versi…

It is absolutely not alarmist. Seriously, go apply to be a Homebrew developer right now under an alias, make some useful updates for a few months, then submit a PR as another alias, and approve and merge your own changes from the first alias. After you get away with skipping code review a few times, now go switch a popular package that relies on abandoned sources to point to your fork that makes a few legitimate upda…

Could you clarify what you mean by 'attacks like this happen every day' please?

Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share

#120

Installing a (read: many) custom vim plugins and color scheme and screen version and etc… stops being fun about the third time you have to log into a nameless server. That being said, there are some settings that I absolutely cannot live without; `j=gj` being a good example in vim. IMO your dot files are only useful to share if they are usable with the default software of the place you’ve shared them to. Otherwise th…

I thought the appeal of vi was it can mostly be used "as is" vs emacs being infinitely customizable? The folks I know who use vi do so because they are at their core, sysadmins, and something simple and consistent is valued.

Vim and Neovim are pretty close to being infinitely customizable, but vi is a different story. Likewise, Emacs can be used as is. If anything, the difference was in the core audience. A sysadmin is more hesitant about customizing their tools because they tend to deal with many different systems. It's also the main reason why they use vi (Vim and Neovim are simply substitutes), because it is always available. Emacs tended to attract people who customized their tools.

These days, things are a bit different. Vim and Neovim are more easily customized, and have gained a following because it is more finger friendly (even if it is harder to learn).

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