dotfiles

My dot files, managed by chezmoi

Usage

Using on a new machine, after installing chezmoi (I use Ansible)

chezmoi init https://github.com/willquill/dotfiles.git

Check the diff to verify you aren't overwriting something you want to keep:

chezmoi diff

Apply the changes:

chezmoi apply

Pull latest changes from the repo and see what would change without applying:

chezmoi git pull -- --autostash --rebase && chezmoi diff

Pull latest changes and apply:

chezmoi git pull -- --autostash --rebase && chezmoi apply

Modifying

On a system using chezmoi, if you want to edit the ~/.gitconfig file, you should be editing the template instead of the file directly.

To edit ~/.local/share/chezmoi/dot_zshrc.tmpl, use the following command:

chezmoi edit ~/.zshrc

This will open your editor to edit the template file that populates ~/.zshrc.

Alternatively, enter the chezmoi directory with this:

chezmoi cd

Adding new files to Chezmoi

Scenario: You like to keep your Starship config in ~/.config/starhip.toml

First, put your file where you want it to be. Then add it to chezmoi.

chezmoi source-path &&\
  chezmoi add ~/.config/starship.toml

Ignore files/directories on different machines

See here for documentation

vim ~/.local/share/chezmoi/chezmoiignore

Add these contents:

README.md
{{- if ne .chezmoi.hostname "work-laptop" }}
.work # only manage .work on work-laptop
{{- end }}

This will omit installing the README on all machines and only install .work if hostname is work-laptop.

Templating

To make managing chezmoi easier, the templates should, when possible, reference a chezmoi variable (similar to an Ansible fact), for which a key/value pair always exist on every host.

However, you can also have a template use a value that comes from a file on the host. For example, if I want the value of init.templateDir in my git config to be unique per host and for the value to not come from a chezmoi variable, I would need to populate the value within ~/.config/chezmoi/chezmoi.yaml on the host. You can use TOML, JSON, JSONC, or YAML.

Here's an example of me creating and populating the file on a new macOS system:

mkdir -p ~/.config/chezmoi && echo -e "data:\n  templateDir: \"/Users/will/.git-template\"" > ~/.config/chezmoi/chezmoi.yaml

Alternatively, instead of manually creating the file, see this doc on creating the config file automatically.

And in my dot_gitconfig.tmpl file, I would enter:

[init]
    templateDir = {{ .templateDir }}

By doing that, the value of templateDir after applying my dot_gitconfig.tmpl file will be /Users/will/.git-template.

The ~/.zshrc will also be generated from a template, but it uses chezmoi variables like os and hostname (see them with chezmoi data) and does not require the chezmoi.yaml file.

Adding kitty.conf template

chezmoi add ~/.config/kitty/kitty.conf --template

Add a few base settings and something machine-specific:

# Base Kitty settings
font_family      FiraCode Nerd Font
enable_audio_bell no
background #232627

{{ if eq .chezmoi.hostname "spacewalk" }}
# Machine-specific overrides
font_size 10.0
{{ end }}

See a diff:

chezmoi diff ~/.config/kitty/kitty.conf

Apply:

chezmoi apply

Additional Notes

Git Config

The init.templateDir specifies the directory from which template files and directories will be copied when initializing a new repository.

Starship

Color theme information found here.

Provisioning outside of Chezmoi

Fonts

To get the FiraCode Nerd Font with a script, execute the appropriate firacode.sh script for your OS.

Credit

• Inspiration from Kevin