Tech News
← Back to articles

Dotfiles feel too personal to share

read original related products more articles

I love dotfiles.

“Dotfiles” is a term that refers to configuration files used to configure software and operating systems. They are called such because often these files start with a dot. You may have seen .bashrc , .tmux.conf or .zshrc in the wild.

Whenever a software doesn’t offer direct file-based configuration, I feel sad because it means I need to take extra steps to keep my configuration across different devices in sync or when setting up a new machine.

I love sharing.

I regularly publish ideas and experiences in my blog, I share my notes in my digital garden and I publish almost all the code I write (outside work) as open source in GitHub.

I love to read other people’s dotfiles and learn from them.

Yet, somehow I feel like sharing my own dotfiles to the world is beyond my comfort zone. I feel my customisations and aliases and other decisions are too intimate and personal to share.

I don’t quite know why though.

I have a really cool repository where I keep my dotfiles and there’s quite a lot there. There’s the usual suspects like my zsh config and aliases, my tmux configuration and my neovim and vscode stuff too. And my Python startup script.

I also keep my Homebrew core list there: that’s all the packages I want to always have at hand. Having them all in one place to be installed with a single command on a new computer is lovely.

... continue reading