Dotfiles

Preface

I finally decided to make this. I put it off for a long time but I wanted to share some of my configs with my co-workers and this is the easiest way to do that.

Installation

I think it should be obvious what to do here.

for i in [a-z]* ; do
    cp $i $HOME/.$i
done

Contents

On my workstation, there are generally four programs I always run whenever I log in: a terminal (which runs bash), Firefox, Thunderbird, and Emacs.

gitconfig

I don’t typically copy a .gitconfig in place. Instead I just enter these commands in the shell.

git config --global user.name 'Jeff Carlson'
git config --global user.email 'my email address'
git config --global alias.ci 'commit -a'
git config --global alias.co 'checkout'
git config --global alias.last 'log -1 HEAD'
git config --global alias.long 'log --graph --pretty=full --all --color --stat'
git config --global alias.prune 'branch -d'
git config --global alias.remaster 'pull origin master'
git config --global alias.unstage 'reset HEAD --'

bash_profile

This started life as the stock file shipped from RedHat Linux, eventually progressing to Fedora.

The ls command on FreeBSD does color much like GNU ls. CLICOLOR just has to be set, it doesn’t matter what value it has.

Emacs is life. As I said, I just start it when I log in and it just keeps humming along, ready for me to use. If I’m using a computer that doesn’t have Emacs, I quite like mg (for Micro-Gnu-emacs, which is BSD licensed so, go figure; it comes from the OpenBSD project). I used to use zile as an alternative to Emacs, so it’s still a decent fall back if it’s installed. Note that commands like visudo will only honor the EDITOR variable if the value is a file and not an alias.

When your home directory is mounted via NFS, it is nice to keep your shell history separated per host name. Also, learn from your past, save more shell history.

Note that for the root account, I like to separate out the shell history per $SUDO_USER.

I like files that begin with dots to sort first, followed by capital letters, and finally lower case – basically, ASCII order. Therefore, I reset the locale setting back to good ol’ Posix.

Some machines I’m on don’t have a prompt string set. So, I added a way to add a host-specific prompt or alias and function files.

Finally, who doesn’t like a little extra fortune in their life?

bashrc

This file also started its life from the stock RedHat skeleton file.

As I have added a few Debian-based installations to my life, meeting the needs of both flavors of Linux requires a little flexibility, which is only a good thing, I think.

The Debian skeleton file adds a line to break out of this file if the session is not interactive. It seems like a good idea not to waste time on interactive settings in a non-interactive session.

RedHat removed the interogative flags from some file utilities many years ago. I put them back. I also like the dir and vdir commands to be in color.

The extglob shell option allows you to use regex-like glob-prefixes on the command line. Setting lithist means when you hit the up arrow, any multi-line shell commands will retain those newlines. You can cd into a directory just by entering it as a command if autocd is set. Honestly, I don’t use this very often but it sounds like a cool idea so I leave it on. And globstar mimicks the only function I ever heard about in zsh that I thought was compelling enough to try it out, but now I don’t have to. It allows you to recurse directories by adding two asterisks.

Since the profile is sourced for a login shell, and the rc file is sourced for interactive sessions, add the local customizations again in case this is not a login shell.

I have migrated my shell functions to the dot-local-lib-bash repository.

emacs

Did I mention Emacs is life? I have been using Emacs for about as long as I have been using Linux and Unix. I probably fired up Emacs the first time I installed Linux on my trusty old 386. Today, I don’t start writing anything unless it’s in Emacs. Even word processors just bug me because they aren’t Emacs.

For years I only added a few configuration lines to my .emacs file, preferring to leave it pretty close to stock. Now I see I lost a lot of time with that because Emacs extensions can do so much for you.

Before I move forward, it’s worth noting that there are multiple locations Emacs will look for its initialization file. I think the first one found wins, and it starts with ~/.emacs. Second will be ~/.emacs.d/init.elc and third will be ~/.emacs.d/init.el, the former being the byte-compiled (for speed) version of the latter. I just use ~/.emacs out of habbit.

Also, some people like to turn their init file into an org-mode document and use symantec processing to load it. I have not done this.

Quite recently I have started watching the Using Emacs series on YouTube by Mike Zamansky. He is a college professor in New York and Emacs enthusiast. Through this series I have learned about a lot of Emacs extensions and so I recently began incorporating many of them into my own Emacs configuration.

Just as Perl has CPAN and Python has pip (we could go on a while with this), Emacs has ELPA – the Emacs Lisp Package Archive. And there are a few other archives worth knowing about, specifically MELPA – Milkypostman’s ELPA. The beginning code sets up MELPA, which is kind of the bleeding-edge repository built mostly from recent Git commits, and Stable MELPA.

I use Emacs’ built-in configuration editor whenever possible to set variables. Some variables are global, others are for specific modes and packages.

I had to use Windows recently. Cascadia is a font that Microsoft made and released under an open source license which looks really good. The lower-case L does not look like a one and zero does not look like an upper-case O. It’s a TrueType font and it’s available for Linux, too.

I use narrowing a lot when editing. Allowing it to be used requires a special flag. I like to use “y” and “n,” getc(3)-style instead of “yes” and “no” with an explicit ENTER. And you can turn off quite a few things in Emacs. I actually like the menu and toolbar but I don’t really use the scrollbar.

Although I don’t code in some of these languages, I like having hide-show mode available to any that support it so I can use it even if viewing code. I just wish there were hs-minor-modes for HTML.

Discovering tramp was probably one of the most life-changing events I can think of. I used to install Emacs on tons of servers, but now I can use it from the comfort of my own workstation and basically bring the work to me. The proxies ensure that first you make an external connection using ssh as a normal user before invoking sudo, but still allows you to use sudo without such a proxy if you’re working on the local machine.

If emacs is your $EDITOR (actually emacsclient), then start in shell-script-mode when using fc or C-x e on the command line. Likewise, start in mail-mode when composing an email with Mutt.

The Emacs server is what emacsclient connects to.

Remember packages? There’s a package called use-package, which allows you to automatically install almost any package when Emacs first starts up if it’s not already installed. This saves you from having to run package-list-packages or package-install all the time to install them on new machines. It also allows you to keep configuration of specific elements of those packages nice and tidy in their own little lisp-blocks. This code installs use-package before trying to use use-package to install other packages.

I’m not going to talk about all the packages.

I will talk about color-theme-modern. For terminals, I really like Solarized themes. But I didn’t like the Solarized Emacs theme, I think it washed out some of the colors. I like the “Classic” theme which is a dark slate-gray background and wheat foreground. And the other colors used throughout the theme remain crisp without getting all angry-fruit-salad on me.

In Episode 47 of Using Emacs, Zamansky said of Magit (pronounced like “magic”), if you are a developer using Git and Emacs, you have to use Magit. If you are a developer using Git but not Emacs, start using just Magit. And if you’re not a developer, become one, just so you can use Magit. There are some really cool features, I recommend people check out this video.

And I just want to go over a few packages that I already skipped past just real quick. First, beacon mode makes the line the cursor is on flash briefly when the screen is redrawn, like when you switch buffers or move a full page up or down. Diminish just allows you to hide some mode information from the mode-line because it might not be useful to always see it. Try mode allows you to download and use a package without permanently installing it; it won’t save to ~/.emacs.d or edit ~/.emacs.

I put the org-babel list at the end because it’s really long. What is org-babel? It’s an extension that allows you to execute code snippets from inside an org-mode file. If you open this file in Emacs, put your cursor in the example under Installation, and hit C-c C-c, it will run that shell command.

mg

I often use mg to make quick edits on files the way many people would probably use vi. But I like mg, it has nice key bindings which emulate Emacs.

There aren’t that many settings for mg. I only found a couple I thought were worth while.

muttrc

I have multiple IMAP accounts, but I like Mutt to work the same way on all of them. I don’t access all of them from the same instance of Mutt. Therefore, this is the base config, and each of my accounts is accessed as follows.

First, create the directory for mutt configs.

mkdir ~/.mutt

Second is to set up a new config in that directory for each of the accounts. Each one should include the top-level .muttrc.

source ~/.muttrc

Finally, add aliases to a resource file, perhaps ~/.local/lib/bash/mail.sh.

# -*- shell-script -*-

alias mail1="mutt -F ~/.mutt/mail1"
alias mail2="mutt -F ~/.mutt/mail2"

This will get sourced in my .bashrc and I just type the name of the account to access it.