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Dotfiles feel too personal to share

hamatti.org

141–150 of 153 posts

Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share

#141

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 have some variant of this where I mostly refuse to use shell aliases, since I come from a time when you might be remoted somewhere and not have your shell available and I want the muscle memory in the middle of a fire. People look at me like I'm crazy for typing the longer commands out.

Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share

#142
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 te…

Interesting. Are vim on the CLI and Vim the gui program two separate things? (I actually used "MacVim" on MacOS for basic note taking in class since I could alt tab to it, but tended to do any script writing in vim on the cli.)

Anyways, my only customizations are usually to turn on line numbers and syntax highlighting... I also have sublime, but sometimes I find writing a script it can be helpful to just use a very simple editor, write out some psudocode with comments, then slowly build it out... it's easy to get distracted in a full blown IDE. (And I'd argue emacs or vim when heavily customized effectively become an IDE)

Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share

#143

I'll never understand people not wanting to share their dots. Obviously you have to have a way to not share the private stuff of which there are many simple solutions, but I've learned so much from reading other peoples. To each their own, of course.

I don't even know what the author means here. I put them public on GitHub, because I can clone them from anywhere and have my config on any machine. The approximate number of people, who read them and see what I did, is 0. I just "share" them for public and free backup. Someone thinking that bash aliases can be "intimate" is a next level of nerdyness for me. Reminds me of "gay code" scene from Silicon Valley.

[deleted]

Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share

#144

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.

> leave valuables on the table when you walk away I actually do this somewhat frequently at my local game shop. Thousands of dollars' worth of Magic: The Gathering cards (because I bring multiple decks instead of just the one I'm playing) in my backpack left behind as I go to get some water or something. > high trust societies only work when the price of ongoing admission is not violating that trust Indeed, the reaso…

Very true. It also helps that from my experience MTG players are some of the nicest people you’ll meet

Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share

#146
post #59

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 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.

It's another form of perfectionist paralysis and rationalizing doing more non-value-add, error-prone, manual effort.

Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share

#147
post #30

It's not a question of share everything or share nothing - with https://chezmoi.io you can choose exactly what you want to share: * You can keep your entire dotfile repo secret by using any private git hosting, including your own git hosting or a private GitHub repo. * You can keep individual files secret by using age or gpg encryption. If you repo is public, this only reveals the existence of the file, not its conte…

Meta had an internal tool called "dotsync". It persisted multiple revisions of dotfiles across multiple machines associated with a particular user's account. It supported ignoring history and secret files by patterns. This is a superset of simply storing all dotfiles in a single git repo. This unmaintained project seems suspiciously similar including the name: https://dotsync.org

Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share

#148
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 te…

Interesting. Are vim on the CLI and Vim the gui program two separate things? (I actually used "MacVim" on MacOS for basic note taking in class since I could alt tab to it, but tended to do any script writing in vim on the cli.) Anyways, my only customizations are usually to turn on line numbers and syntax highlighting... I also have sublime, but sometimes I find writing a script it can be helpful to just use a very s…

I hardly ever use gvim. From my understanding, there are a few relatively minor GUI specific settings for the GUI version. Contrast that to emacs. It's possible to present documents with multiple fonts and images in the graphical version. (The irony: vim and gvim are separate binaries, which emacs can have a unified CLI/GUI binary.)

I agree that heavily customized, emacs and vim can be an IDE and that it can be distracting. It is possible to pick and choose the desirable (e.g. non-distracting) elements of an IDE when configuring either editor, but that in itself turns into a distraction.

Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share

#149
post #102
post #53

That's something I was a little bit conflicted about for some time. After using a few open source tools(shoutout to syncthing and linkding :)) and I realised that if you want to use something for free, sharing is the least you can do. My dotfiles are private for now cause I need to clean some commits(I think I might have added some private info before) but I intend to publish them eventually

> My dotfiles are private for now cause I need to clean some commits I had to do similar. I ended up deleting the git history and just recreating it before pushing. The best thing was to add a dependency on `~/.secrets` or other similar un-tracked file, which is basically just a source-able script that defines things like API keys, private URLs, etc.

I thought about recreating the repo from scratch too. I was transfering from Intel to ARM Mac and keep a few tags/commits related to previous configs, so it is hard to just let it go :)

Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share

#150
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no. simple but complicated. does the same .bash_profile/.bashrc work on different linux versions? what about macos? and now macos no longer uses bash. And what about saving .bash_history? and on and on. there is a whole industry of shell scripts that try to help with this.

> does the same .bash_profile/.bashrc work on different linux versions? If we weight versions by likelihood of interacting with them, yes, they do. > what about macos? I handle macOS as a special case; it is not too difficult. Mostly, macOS boils down to "Get brew, download the GNU tools with brew, alias the commands to the GNU set", mostly because macOS's builtin tools are crap. The real problem is macOS, not the do…

yeah, I think i'm with you, zsh and a moderately customized profile is more than enough.
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