Dotfiles (Tom Ryder)

Personal repository of dotfiles. This is for those settings that migrate well from machine to machine and that I consider safe to publish. You’re welcome to use them, and there’s an attempt to keep my own personal data out of the files, but you’ll probably want to fork it to remove anything peculiar to my setup that I’ve left in here.

It’s more likely you’ll want to read the configuration files and find snippets relevant to your particular workflow.

Tools

Configuration is included for:

• Bash — GNU Bourne-Again Shell, including a ~/.profile configured to work with most Bourne-compatible shells
• cURL — Command-line tool for transferring data with URL syntax
• dircolors(1) — Color GNU ls(1) output
• Git — Distributed version control system
• GnuPG — GNU Privacy Guard, for private communication and file encryption
• i3 — Tiling window manager
• Mutt — Terminal mail user agent
• mysql(1) — Command-line MySQL client
• Ncmpcpp — ncurses music player client
• Newsbeuter — Terminal RSS/Atom feed reader
• psql(1) — Command-line PostgreSQL client
• Readline — GNU library for user input used by Bash, MySQL, and others
• Taskwarrior — Command-line task list manager
• tmux — Terminal multiplexer similar to GNU Screen
• rxvt-unicode — Fork of the rxvt terminal emulator with Unicode support
• Vim — Vi IMproved, a text editor
• Vimperator — Vimperator, a Firefox browser extension allowing Vim-like modes and keybindings
• Wyrd — a curses calendar frontend for Remind
• X11 — Windowing system with network transparency for Unix

Also included are a few scripts for ~/.local/bin, and their man(1) pages.

The configurations for Bash, GnuPG, Mutt, tmux, and Vim are the most expansive and most likely to be of interest. The i3 configuration is mostly changed to make window switching behave like Vim windows and tmux panes do, and there’s a fair few resources defined for rxvt-unicode. Otherwise, the rest of the configuration isn’t too distant from the defaults.

Installation

$ git clone git://github.com/tejr/dotfiles.git ~/.dotfiles
$ cd ~/.dotfiles
$ git submodule init
$ make
$ make -n install
$ make install

For the default target, you’ll need bash(1), git(1), install(1), make(1), m4(1), and tic(1). You’ll need to have a recent enough version of Git to support submodules for the Vim installation to work; it’s required for the plugin setup.

The installation Makefile will overwrite things standing in the way of its installed files without backing them up, so read the output of make -n install before running make install to make sure you aren’t going to lose anything unexpected. If you’re still not sure, install it in a temporary directory so you can explore:

$ mktemp -d
/tmp/tmp.YZFW8ScFZP
$ make install HOME=/tmp/tmp.YZFW8ScFZP

The default target will install the core terminal-only files (cURL, Git, GnuPG, Vim, and shell and terminal setup files). The remaining dotfiles can be installed with the other targets. Take a look at the Makefile to see what’s available.

Shell

My .profile and other files in sh are written in Bourne/POSIX shell script, so they should work in most sh(1) implementations. Individual scripts called by .profile are saved in .profile.d and iterated on login for ease of management. All of these boil down to exporting variables appropriate to the system and the software it has available.

My .bash_profile calls .profile for variable exports, and then runs .bashrc for interactive shells. Subscripts are kept in .bashrc.d, and all are loaded for the creation of any new interactive shell. The contents of this directory changes all the time depending on the host, and only specific scripts in it are versioned.

My interactive and scripting shell of choice is Bash; as a GNU/Linux admin who ends up installing Bash on *BSD machines anyway, I very rarely have to write Bourne-compatible scripts, so all of these files are replete with Bashisms.

As I occasionally have work on very old internal systems, my Bash is written to work with any version 2.05a or newer. This is why I use older syntax for certain things such as appending items to arrays:

array=("${array[@]}" "$item")

Compare this to the much nicer syntax available since 3.1-alpha1, which actually works for arrays with sparse indexes, unlike the above syntax:

array+=("$item")

Where I do use features that are only available in versions of Bash newer than 2.05a, such as newer shopt options or PROMPT_DIRTRIM, they are only run after testing BASH_VERSINFO appropriately.

When I use any other Bourne-compatible shell, I’m generally happy to accept its defaults for interactive behavior.

My prompt looks something like this:

It expands based on context to include these elements in this order:

• Whether in a Git, Mercurial, or Subversion repository if applicable, and punctuation to show whether there are local modifications at a glance
• The number of running background jobs, if non-zero
• The exit status of the last command, if non-zero

This is all managed within the prompt function. There’s some mildly hacky logic on tput codes included such that it should work correctly for most common terminals using both termcap(5) and terminfo(5), including *BSD systems. It’s also designed to degrade gracefully for eight-color and no-color terminals.

Completion

I find the bash-completion package a bit too heavy for my tastes, and turn it off using a stub file installed in .config/bash_completion. The majority of the time I just want to complete paths anyway, and this makes for a quicker startup without a lot of junk functions in my Bash namespace.

I do make some exceptions with completions defined in .bashrc.d files for things I really do get tired of typing repeatedly:

• Builtins, commands, help topics, shell options, and variables
• ftp(1) hostnames from ~/.netrc
• git(1) branch names
• gpg(1) long options
• make(1) targets read from a Makefile
• mysql(1) databases from ~/.mysql/*.cnf
• pass(1) entries
• ssh(1) hostnames from ~/.ssh/config

Functions

There are a few other little tricks in bash/bashrc.d, including:

• bd — Change into a named ancestor of the current directory
• ca — Count given arguments
• cf — Count files in a given directory
• hgrep — HISTFILE search
• mkcd — Create a directory and change into it
• mkcp — Create a directory and copy arguments into it
• mkmv — Create a directory and move arguments into it
• pa — Print given arguments, one per line
• pd — Change to the argument’s parent directory
• scr — Create a temporary directory and change into it
• sprunge — Pastebin frontend tool I pilfered from #bash on Freenode
• ud — Change into an indexed ancestor of a directory

I also wrap a few command calls with functions to stop me from doing silly things that the commands themselves don’t catch. My favourite is the one that stops me from calling scp(1) with no colon in either argument. I also do things like give default arguments to pwgen(1).

Testing

You can test that both sets of shell scripts are syntactically correct with make test-bash, make test-sh, or make test for everything including the scripts in bin.

GnuPG

The configuration for GnuPG is intended to follow RiseUp’s OpenPGP best practices. The configuration file is rebuilt using m4(1) and make(1) because it requires hard-coding a path to the SKS keyserver certificate authority, and neither tilde nor $HOME expansion works for this.

Mutt

My mail is kept in individual Maildirs under ~/Mail, with inbox being where most unfiltered mail is sent. I use Getmail, Procmail, and MSMTP; the configurations for these are not included here. I make heavy use of GnuPG for email—everything is signed by default, and I encrypt whenever I have a public key available for the recipient. The GnuPG interfacing is done with GPGme, rather than defining commands for each crypto operation. I wrote an article about this setup if it sounds appealing.

You’ll need Abook installed if you want to use the query_command I have defined, and msmtp for the sendmail command.

rxvt-unicode

A tiny script called clip is included in ~/.urxvt/ext to copy selections into the X CLIPBOARD buffer as well as PRIMARY. This is purely preference as I find it pretty maddening otherwise, particularly when dealing with URLs from IRC.

The included .Xresources file assumes that urxvt can use 256 colors and Perl extensions, and has its standard selection script available. If you’re missing functionality, try changing perl-ext-common to default.

My choice of font is Ubuntu Mono, but the file should allow falling back to the more common Deja Vu Sans Mono. I’ve found Terminus works well too, but bitmap fonts are not really my cup of tea. The Lohit Kannada font bit is purely to make ಠ_ಠ work correctly. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) seems to work out of the box.

tmux

These are just generally vi-friendly settings, not much out of the ordinary. Note that the configuration presently uses a hard-coded 256-color colorscheme, and uses non-login shells, with an attempt to control the environment to stop shells thinking they have access to an X display—I’m forced to use PuTTY a lot at work, and I don’t like Xming very much.

The configuration for Bash includes a tmux function designed to make attach into the default command if no arguments are given and sessions do already exist. The default command is normally new-session.

Vim

The majority of the .vimrc file is just setting options, with a few mappings. I try not to deviate too much from the Vim defaults behaviour in terms of interactive behavior and keybindings.

The configuration is extensively commented, mostly because I was reading through it one day and realised I’d forgotten what half of it did. Plugins are loaded using @tpope’s pathogen.vim.

Scripts

Three SSH-related scripts and their manuals are included:

• shoal(1) — Print hostnames read from a ssh_config(5) file
• scatter(1) — Run command on multiple hosts read from shoal(1) and print output
• shock(1) — Run command on multiple hosts read from shoal(1) and print the hostname if the command returns zero

If you want to use the manuals, you may need to add ~/.local/share/man to your /etc/manpath configuration, depending on your system.

There's also a script han(1) to provide a keywordprg for Bash script development that will look for help topics. You could use it from the shell too. It also has a brief manual.

Known issues

I’d welcome patches or advice on fixing any of these problems.

• The install-terminfo target does not work correctly on NetBSD due to the different way tic(1) works, which I don’t understand at all.

License

Public domain; see the included UNLICENSE file. It’s just configuration, do whatever you like with it if any of it’s useful to you. If you’re feeling generous, you could always buy me a beer next time you’re in New Zealand.