Updating my dotfiles

I decided to spring clean my Dotfiles repo↗, as it had been a while. Then I noticed that the last time I mentioned them on the blog was nearly ten years ago, so I wanted to give a quick update. The most significant change is that I have moved to using Zsh↗ and Oh My Zsh↗ since Zsh became the default Shell in macOS.

Install everything needed for the dotfiles

The commands below assume you are starting from a clean installation, which I do at least once a year. The first thing is to install Oh MyZsh:

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

Once installed, we can download and install the Fonts and Theme I use:

brew tap homebrew/cask-fonts
brew install font-hack-nerd-font
git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/romkatv/powerlevel10k.git ${ZSH_CUSTOM:-$HOME/.oh-my-zsh/custom}/themes/powerlevel10k

There are some other tools called by the dot files, so lets install those too.

brew install tree pygments ffmpeg yt-dlp visual-studio-code drawio thefuck stow zoxide gh
gh extension install github/gh-copilot # enable the gh-copilot  extension
gh copilot alias -- zsh # run one and accept the t&cs

Pulling and setting up the dotfiles

First, we need to pull my dotfiles repo↗:

git clone git@github.com:russmckendrick/dotfiles.git ~/.dotfiles

Then, create backups of all of the existing files:

mv ~/.zprofile ~/.dotfiles/backups/
mv ~/.zshrc ~/.dotfiles/backups/
mv ~/.gitconfig ~/.dotfiles/backups/

Now we can create symbolic links to load contents from our ~/.dotfiles folder using stow:

cd ~/.dotfiles
stow .

What does it look like?

Below are some screens of what my current terminal looks like:

You can also click on the link below to see it in action:

Conclusion

In this blog post, we walked through updating my dotfiles repository and setting up your development environment on a fresh macOS installation. I created a highly personalised and efficient terminal setup by using tools like Oh My Zsh, custom fonts, and a custom theme. While these dotfiles are tailored to my specific needs and may not be suitable for everyone to copy directly, they provide a great example of how to customize and streamline your development workflow. Keeping your dotfiles up to date and versioned in a repository is a great way to maintain consistency across your machines and make setting up new environments a breeze.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment.