Thanks to some influential people on youtube I started to tinker with my zsh, neovim and tmux setup and finally created my own dotfile hell repository.
Some days aggo I revisited nixos, and out of curiosity tile managers under linux (hyprland and sway). While researching, I encoutered a lot of tweaks for zsh, neovim and tmux and I started to tinker. A first result is a styled zsh environment based on starship, a neovim setup with the most essential plugins.
The whole setup, except for the nixos installation, is stored in the dotfile repository.
I'll have to update this post as the settings get more settled and final but for now I would like to share the skeleton.
Before
Before building up enough will to set up everything from scratch, I used to install ZSH and YADR on all of my systems, be it a linux/macOS workstations or virtualized server. YADR - yet another dotfile repo - took care of most settings and enabled me to have a reproduciable environment on all platforms, which for a while just works.
Where needed, I added some individualization by soft-linking configs from my cloud to the config-directories. A setup I could reproduce on a new computers in minutes instead of hours.
Using YADR worked quite good, but it also always felt a little bit bloated and surely exceeded my abilities. For example, when I tipped my toes into using tmux some presets hindered me, as the default keymaps were different and I got really frustrated by that.
Also for macOS I used iTerm for several years. iTerm also just works and the sane shortcuts for session management, tabing and tiling are simply burnt into my muscle memory.
When I started to setup a PC with linux I first didn't find a good replacement until I discovered ghostty. And finally I wanted ghostty to beave the same on every platform.
After
While researching for a hyprland setup I came across GNU Stow. GNU stow is basically a tool that allows to softlink directories and files in bulk. You might want to get familiar with it by watching something like Dreams of Autonomy - Stow has forever changed the way I managed my dotfile.
Stow opened up the possibility to replace YADR and my cloud setup.
Sources
- typcraft - You need to try Hyprland on Linux right now | Hyprland for Nebws E1
- typcraft - This might be my favorite Hyprland config ever! | Hyprland for Nebws EP 3
- Dreams of Code - Tmux has forever changed the way I write code
- Dreams of Autonomy - This ZSH config is perhaps my favorite one yet
- Dreams of Autonomy - Stow has forever changed the way I managed my dotfile