My dotfiles, currently somewhat bare after resetting in summer of 2025 after maintinging my old ones since 2017.
I want to be consious about my configuration. In the past, I would just add new, cool things on a whim without putting to much thought into it. This would lead to a confuluted config that did not feel like home.
I'm holding myself accountable here by writing out the decisions I made.
In the past, I used a bare repository to manage my dotfiles. This made it simple to track my dotfiles in Git, but came with side-effects I did not like:
- There now is a git repository in my root directory. Even if only explicit files are tracked, a lot of tools pick up the
.gitfolder and try to act on it (e.g. when opening any file in VSCode that was not in another explicit Git directory) - Adding new files to the repositry with the explicit command felt unergonomic
- It requires a lot of git-specific setup
The current solution is simple: The contents of this repository are store in a /dotfiles folder in my home directory, which is a Git repository. It resembles the same structure I want in my home directory. To apply changes, I simply run stow .
I tried a multitude of runtime version managers. There are managers specific to a single language, that tend to be more stable but require you to install multiple tools. The ones I used are rbenv, rvm, nvm and pyenv.
There are others that aim to manage multiple languate runtime version, of which I tried asdf and now mise.
I don't have a clear path forward here yet, as I haven't been happy with either solution so far. I don't have enough experience to talk about mise yet, so I is in here for an evaluation.
I've been using homebrew for my entire career and have little to complain about. I utilize a Brewfile to have all my packages as code.
It gives me a lot of features ot of the box that I would have needed to add manully with zsh, such as autocompletion. I decided to not roll any custom setup for now and just stick to a community prompt. I might change that again if it annoys me too much.