I often feel quite nomadic when using Bash. I’m somewhat a hobo developer, moving from home to home. Recently I’ve been working with OS X at work, and I’ve been on OS X at home for years. Yet still I had some machines where my bash history would drop off quickly, and where aliases I use a lot didn’t exist. When I worked out how to get hostname completion working with ssh I decided it was time to have a dotfiles project.
In case you’re not familiar with the concept of a dotfiles project, the term dot file refers to settings files whose filename typically starts with a dot in UNIX. For example, there’s your .bash_profile file which indicates what should be run when you login. You may have Git settings defined in .gitconfig. A dotfiles project is one which lets users synchronise their dotfiles across different machines.
Before starting my own, I had a look at some of the projects that already exist, indexed on GitHub does dotfiles. A popular project is Oh-My-Zsh, which may suit you if you use Zsh as your shell. As a itinerate developer I have to use what I find, so I wanted to stick with Bash. Zach Holman has an interesting project with some ideas I really liked. But I didn’t find anything for Bash that I really liked.
I had been surprised that the installation of some dotfiles projects does a lot more than installing some dotfiles, doing things like changing Mac settings etc. This is my Bash bindle—not my OS X bindle—so I didn’t want that.
I wanted the project:
- To not ‘install’ anything
- To be very easily added to using filename conventions to allow the elements of customisation to be found rather than specified
- To be entirely self contained other than a single hook into the user’s profile
- To be removed as easily as removing a single line and removing the directory
- To be easily extended by adding a single directory, potentially outside the bindle
- To be ignorant of whether you are on a Mac
- To play nicely with existing profiles and configuration
Bash Dotfiles Bindle
A bindle is the bag, sack, or carrying device stereotypically used by the commonly American sub-culture of hobos.
Bindle, from Wikipedia
With these preferences in mind, I created Bash Dotfiles Bindle on Github, and I think it fits all the above requirements. There’s not much in it yet, but now that I have a means to synchronise my settings I’m spending more time finding the ‘right’ way to do things, and to save those things in the bindle so that I can use them elsewhere later. Running the installation installs a hook into .bashrc (the interactive non-login profile), which sets up the environment. If it looks like there is no call from .bash_profile (the interactive login profile) to also run .bashrc then it adds one. If you don’t understand the difference between the various profile files, this answer explains it perfectly.
There’s no commitment by installing it, and it gives you some cool stuff by default.