Dotmatrix is a collection of dotfiles used to customize various development tools.
Dotfiles are really just plain text files that start with a '.' and they are used to set preferences for things like Git and Vim. To see your current dotfiles, open a terminal and in your home folder run this:
$ ls -a
Most users will see a long list of files that you might not have know were even there! Since they start with a '.' the OS ignores them (usually) - those are your current dotfiles, Dotmatrix hopes to replace/augment whatever configuration you already have.
Start by cloning down the repo:
$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/BrandonShega/dotmatrix.git
Then run this script:
$ bin/install
This script symlinks all dotfiles into your home directory.
When you install Dotmatrix like this, only files that do not already exist in your $HOME directory will be linked. If you have your own .bashrc file, for example, Dotmatrix won't mess with it.
What I'd recommend, however, is moving that file to ~/.bashrc.local, and
Dotmatrix will source it for you.
Sometimes it's useful to only install part of Dotmatrix. For partial
installation, you can create a FILES file in the root of Dotmatrix that
contains a newline-delimited list of dotfiles to symlink and keep up to date
with Dotmatrix.
When FILES exists in the Dotmatrix source directory, running bin/install
will only symlink the dotfiles listed within FILES.
If, for example, you only want the tmux configuration and sharedrc files, and want to ignore all of the rest of Dotmatrix's dotfiles:
$ cd path/to/dotmatrix
$ cat FILES
.tmux.conf
.sharedrc
$ bin/install # Only installs .tmux.conf and .sharedrc
For Vim users, there's another command you might want to run, after you've run
bin/install from inside Vim:
:PlugInstall
Or from the command line:
vim -c 'PlugInstall | qa'This will install the set of Vim plugins we use.
After you've done ./bin/install, you'll have a .vimbundle file and this is a
manifest of sorts that Vim Plug script
will use to install various vim plugins. If you have other plugins that you like
that aren't on this list, you can put them in a ~/.vimbundle.local and that
will be installed secondarily.
The ~/.vimbundle.local file should include one plugin per line, each having
the following format:
Plug 'github-user/repo-name'
You need not include a trailing .git.
hr is a command with lots of useful scripts as subcommands, based loosely on
Basecamp's sub.
When you run bin/install, hr is installed automatically. If you don't want
it, simply comment out the line from ~/.zshrc.local or ~/.bashrc.local that
initializes it.
To use, just run hr. Each subcommand is self-documenting.
Keeping your Dotmatrix up-to-date is easy. Just visit the Dotmatrix directory
and run bin/upgrade. This will fetch the latest changes from GitHub and
symlink any new files.