My .config Ship of Theseus

Leonard_of_Q•about 3 hours ago

I sort of get the appeal of fine-tuning the terminal environment to perfection but after fiddling with such things for many years - decades - I ended up using mostly stock settings with a very few changes. The advantage of that approach is that I feel at home just about anywhere instead of just on my one or few customised systems. My customisations mostly consist of a local /bin directory with a few hundred scripts (wc -l now shows 263) I made over the years which I dump in a new environment plus a few additions to .bashrc (yes, bash, not one of the fancy replacements (zsh, fish, oil, ...) which are supposed to be better but in reality just end up being different) to set custom paths etc.

saysjonathan•21 minutes ago

I landed on near the same thing. I also went too far the other way at various points: ed as editor, weirder shells (posix sh, rc, es, rush (ruby shell), pdksh), suckless everything (even on MacOS, where possible). I found my healthy balance between using more modern tools and learning the defaults to avoid too much configuration. I still have 281 lines in dotfiles (according to `git ls-files | xargs cat | wc -l`), along with my dwm.tmux[0] as window manager, but I feel like I can generally operate in most environments as long as base tools are present. If others haven't tried it, I recommend giving it a go. Try being bravely default.

[0] https://github.com/saysjonathan/dwm.tmux

threecheese•about 3 hours ago

And then you get friends like Claude - dozens of them - which prefer to crap all over $HOME.

The app ‘Conductor’ does this, and I had to uninstall it; I just can’t crack my ‘ls ~/.co<TAB>’ habit, and “nd” is juuuuuust ahead of “nf”.

It *used to* be ‘~/c<TAB>’ before .claude crapped itself into existence..

flexagoon•about 2 hours ago

I usually treat an app putting stuff into $HOME with no reason to change that as a reason to not use the app. I've genuinely switched software multiple times because of the old one doing this.

I also suggest you try xdg-ninja, which automatically scans your home directory and shows which of those directories you can change to a different location:

https://github.com/b3nj5m1n/xdg-ninja

I have a big shell config file that sets proper locations for all sort of programs I use:

https://github.com/flexagoon/dotfiles/blob/main/dot_config/f...

chrisweekly•about 2 hours ago

I feel you. My solution is leaning into `z` ("frecency" heuristic), and selective use of "extra" zshrc aliases.

clircle•about 3 hours ago

I’m moving slowly in the direction of Guix home for dotfile management, but until it covers all my bases, I’m fond of the gnu stow method

kalmar•4 minutes ago

Separately from guix-the-distribution? Any chance your config in online somewhere?

nailer•about 3 hours ago

Never understood the point of having a dotfile for all of config when config is the point of dotfiles.

tuckerman•about 2 hours ago

Besides cleanliness which is more a preference I agree, separating config, data, and cache makes it easy to know what can/should be backed up, what can be synced across machines, etc.

zenoprax•about 2 hours ago

I find that there is a tendency to make too many things hidden. I just assume I'll have to show hidden items by default in all contexts now.

My .config Ship of Theseus

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