Dotfiles

This is only public so I can easily share it across machines. There is probably nothing of interest for you here ... or is there?

My usage is mostly terminal-based on MacOS, Debian Trixie over SSH, or sometimes Crostini (Debian) on Chromebook. Making heavy use of:

• Ghostty
• bash / tmux
• Neovim
• fzf / fd / ripgrep
• cmus

Letting me own your machine

git clone https://github.com/fortes/dotfiles.git
./dotfiles/script/setup

On Ubuntu (like 24.04 Noble, which Coder devboxes and most devcontainers use), script/setup runs a lighter setup instead that only installs a few packages and links dotfiles, and is safe to run on every boot (requires root or sudo access). For the same on other pre-provisioned machines, like a Debian 13 (Trixie) devcontainer:

DOTFILES_DEVBOX=1 ./dotfiles/script/setup

Set DOTFILES_SKIP_PACKAGES="bash ssh" (for example) to leave stow packages alone, like bash to keep machine-provided shell startup files. Devbox setup never upgrades its GitHub binaries; run script/install_github_packages fzf neovim yq for that.

Post-Setup

Once you've run setup, you'll still have to do the following universal manual steps (see platform-specific sections for more):

1. Generate the machine's SSH keys via 1Password, then add the key into GitHub and wherever else

2. Add any additional ssh keys into ~/.ssh

3. If it's a server, may want to authorize your other public keys on the new machine:

   ssh-import-id gh:fortes

4. Add your favorite servers into .ssh/config.local

5. Setup .gitconfig.local:

   [user]
     name = Your Name
     email = xyz@abc.com
   

   If you need to tweak any config based upon the directory path, do something like

   [includeIf "gitdir:~/src/company/"]
     path = ~/.config/git/company.gitconfig
   

6. Log into Coding agents

   # GitHub CLI client
   gh auth login
   
   # Launch Claude Code, which will take you through the flow
   claude
   
   # Launch codex CLI to log in
   codex
   
   # Launch Antigravity CLI agent
   agy

Cleaning up stale symlinks

script/stow doesn't unstow packages that no longer exist in the repo. After pulling changes that delete a stowed-files/<pkg>/ directory, broken symlinks can linger in $HOME. To remove broken symlinks that point into the dotfiles tree:

find ~ -maxdepth 5 -type l 2>/dev/null \
  | while read -r link; do
      [ -e "$link" ] && continue
      target=$(readlink "$link")
      case "$target" in *dotfiles/stowed-files*) rm -v "$link" ;; esac
    done

Node package managers

./script/install_node_packages installs and updates Corepack through npm and enables its pnpm and Yarn shims in ~/.local/bin. These select the package-manager version declared by each project. Node and npm come from Homebrew on macOS or ./script/install_node on Linux; Corepack does not manage the Node version.

Native addons in npm globals are built for one Node major version. script/install_node rebuilds them on major upgrades, but Homebrew doesn't, so on macOS run ./script/install_node_packages --rebuild after brew upgrade moves node to a new major version.

Ignoring changes to a file

git update-index --skip-worktree ./symlinks/npmrc

To make changes in the future:

git update-index --no-skip-worktree ./symlinks/npmrc

Neovim

The very first nvim launch on a new machine installs the plugins itself: vim.pack.add() prompts to confirm, then downloads them and compiles the treesitter parsers (which blocks for a minute or two, with progress). They are usable straight away, but anything that already ran during that startup won't pick them up — the file you opened has had its FileType autocmds fire before any parser existed — so :restart once it finishes.

Afterwards, to update plugins, rebuild native components (the fzf sorter) and refresh parsers:

:lua vim.pack.update()
" Must do `:write` to accept the updates, then `:restart`

Re-run this command whenever you pull updates that add or change plugins.

Dropping a plugin from init.lua stops it loading but leaves it on disk. To clean those up:

:lua vim.pack.del(vim.iter(vim.pack.get()):filter(function(p) return not p.active end):map(function(p) return p.spec.name end):totable())

Firefox

• Log into sync accounts, extensions should automatically install
• Configure uBlock Origin
  • Enable in private mode
  • Enable cloud storage mode. Should do the following for you, but doesn't always work:
    • Enable annoyances filters
    • Add Bypass paywalls clean filter by copy-pasting the contents

Chrome

• Log into sync accounts, extensions should automatically install
• Log into 1Password extension

Mac

• Set up Touch ID, Apple account if required

• Remove all the junk from the dock

• Enable Night Shift and set to Sunset to Sunrise

• Turn off Natural Scrolling

• Increase keyboard repeat rate to max, delay to minimum

• Change Globe key to Control dictation

• Disable iCloud syncing of all but Find My Mac & Safari

• Set terminal.app profile, send option as meta key

• May want to install command line tools manually in order to get git: xcode-select --install

• Run setup_mac

• Make sure keys repeat properly in apps that disable it by default:

  • Antigravity: defaults write com.google.antigravity ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false
  • Obsidian: defaults write md.obsidian ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false
  • For other apps that have this issue, do the following:

    # Get the app id
    osascript -e 'id of app "Cursor"'
    # Outputs something like `com.todesktop.xxxxx`
    defaults write -g com.todesktop.xxxxx ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false

• terminal.app sucks with colors, switch to Ghostty and pin it in the dock

• Make sure Rectangle.app starts on login

• Install the 1Password extension in Safari (others should sync automatically)

• If planning on using Docker a lot, can have Colima auto-start on login by running the following:

  brew services start colima

  Otherwise, just run colima start manually when needed.

• If gaming, install battle.net/Steam via brew:

  # May require this first in order to run Battle.net
  # (Steam has a beta that doesn't require Rosetta)
  softwareupdate --install-rosetta --agree-to-license
  
  brew install --cask battle-net steam
  # For battle.net, will need to manually run setup to install the app
  # open /opt/homebrew/Caskroom/battle-net/VERSION/Battle.net-Setup.app

• Log into PlexAmp, and set music-decoy to open it with the play button:

  defaults write com.lowtechguys.MusicDecoy mediaAppPath /Applications/Plexamp.app

Debian Server / Crostini

• For servers, make sure to set up email delivery
• Should also set up unattended upgrades via sudo dpkg-reconfigure unattended-upgrades
• You may need to install avahi-daemon, avahi-dnsconfd, avahi-utils, and libnss-mdns to get .local hostnames to resolve properly
• mergerfs if you want to do any pooling of drives
• cifs-utils may also be useful to have installed for mounting Windows shares

Chromebook

• All the steps from Chrome section above
• Set up "Night Light" if it didn't automatically sync
• Enable Linux, choose a larger disk size (20GB fine?). Double check which debian version it is via lsb_release -a (should be trixie)
• Run setup_machine
• Share Downloads folder with Linux, then symlink via ln -s /mnt/chromeos/MyFiles/Downloads ~/downloads
• Change terminal font by going to chrome-untrusted://terminal/html/nassh_preferences_editor.html
  • Add 'DejaVu Sans Mono Nerd' to the beginning of "Text Font Family"
  • Add the following to custom CSS:

    @font-face {
      font-family: 'DejaVu Sans Mono Nerd';
      src: url(https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts/master/patched-fonts/DejaVuSansMono/Regular/DejaVuSansMNerdFontMono-Regular.ttf);
      font-weight: normal;
      font-style: normal;
    }

Docker

Images are built with some frequency, via CI.

Long-running container

# Start container in background
docker-compose up -d

# Connect to tmux session
docker-compose exec dotfiles tmux attach -t main

# Stop/restart as needed
docker-compose stop
docker-compose start

One-off ephemeral session

Gets deleted when you exit.

docker run -it --rm --name dotfiles -v ~/src:/workspaces ghcr.io/fortes/dotfiles:latest

Persistent container

Preserves state, but not always running

# First time
docker run -it --name dotfiles -v ~/src:/workspaces ghcr.io/fortes/dotfiles:latest

# Later sessions
docker start -ai dotfiles

Building locally

docker build -t dotfiles .

Then follow normal pattern, just use the local image name like so:

docker run -it --rm --name dotfiles dotfiles

Other Notes

Finding packages in backports

Since you have to manually install packages from backports, can be tricky to know what is available. To find out, run the following:

# Installed packages with a newer version in backports
sudo apt-get -s upgrade -t "$(. /etc/os-release && echo "$VERSION_CODENAME")-backports" \
  | grep Backports

# Or the full picture for one package
apt-cache policy neovim

This will list out all the packages installed, then need to search through to manually check which have backports available (pipe to nvim -).

Known Issues

Mac

• Firefox cask gets ornery and no longer updates via brew, currently installed once via script, but updates have to happen manually. Need to investigate further.

License

This repository is licensed under the BSD 3-Clause License. See the LICENSE file for more information.