ddx32's dotfiles

My personal, opinionated collection of dotfiles and setup scripts. Portable across macOS and Linux, managed with GNU Stow: the repo is symlinked into your home directory, so edits live in one git-tracked place.

Feel free to fork, but understand what each line does first. At a minimum, change the Git name/email (.gitconfig), the espanso snippets (.config/espanso/match/base.yml), and — on macOS — the apps installed via scripts/.

Shoutout to Mathias Bynens and his dotfiles repo, which served as the original baseline.

Installation

git clone git@github.com:ddx32/dotfiles.git ~/dotfiles
cd ~/dotfiles
./bootstrap.sh

bootstrap.sh is cross-platform and idempotent. It:

1. Installs stow if missing (detects brew, pacman, or apt-get).
2. Symlinks the dotfiles into $HOME with stow --restow.
3. Installs zsh and oh-my-zsh if missing (keeping this repo's .zshrc).
4. Installs the tools the stowed configs depend on: starship, zellij, and JetBrainsMono Nerd Font.
5. Sets zsh as your login shell.

Step 4 matters because every one of those is loaded behind a command -v guard: if the binary is missing the config silently does nothing, so you get the default oh-my-zsh prompt (or a fallback font) with no error to explain it.

Where a package manager carries them (brew, pacman) they're installed from it. Debian/Ubuntu packages neither starship nor zellij, so those fall back to the upstream release binaries in ~/.local/bin — which .shellrc puts on PATH. The font falls back to the nerd-fonts release; note that Debian's fonts-jetbrains-mono is the unpatched upstream font and does not work, since starship.toml uses Nerd Font glyphs.

First run over existing files

If you already have real files where symlinks need to go (e.g. an existing ~/.zshrc), stow will refuse to overwrite them. Run:

./bootstrap.sh --force

This uses stow --adopt to pull the existing files into the repo, then git restore . to replace them with the repo's versions — leaving the originals as symlinks. Review with git status afterward.

What gets stowed

Everything at the repo root except the entries in .stow-local-ignore is symlinked into $HOME. That includes .zshrc, .aliases, .gitconfig, .tmux.conf, .editorconfig, bin/, everything under .config/ (alacritty, starship, espanso, plus the macOS-only aerospace/ghostty), and .claude/skills/ (custom Claude Code skills; stow folds into the existing ~/.claude, leaving its local state alone).

Not stowed (repo-only): bootstrap.sh, README.md, LICENSE, git metadata, and the macOS-only scripts/ and .macos (see below).

Cross-platform behavior

The shell config guards platform-specific pieces so a single .zshrc works everywhere:

• Homebrew shellenv, the macos oh-my-zsh plugin, and brew-based PATH entries load only on macOS.
• PNPM_HOME and other paths resolve per-OS.
• bin/mount-efi.sh is macOS-only and exits with a message elsewhere; bin/server-here.sh runs anywhere Docker is available.

macOS-only setup

These live in the repo but are not stowed — run them explicitly on a fresh Mac:

• scripts/macos-init.sh — Xcode CLI tools, Rosetta, Homebrew, oh-my-zsh plugins, iTerm2, and .macos system defaults. (The terminal font is not here — bootstrap.sh owns it cross-platform, since the stowed alacritty.toml is what names the family.)
• scripts/brew-mas-install.sh — installs formulae, casks, and Mac App Store apps.
• scripts/dock.sh — rebuilds the Dock from a fixed app list.
• scripts/icloud-files.sh — symlinks iCloud Drive locations.
• .macos — a large batch of defaults write tweaks (sourced by macos-init.sh).

Machine-local & private overrides

Kept out of the repo so per-machine and sensitive settings stay local:

• ~/.config/alacritty/local.toml — machine-local Alacritty overrides (e.g. font size); imported by alacritty.toml, silently skipped if absent.
• ~/.prusa/.config — work-specific shell config, sourced by .zshrc if present.

Notes

Tested on macOS 12.2–14.3, Arch Linux, and Linux Mint 22.3 (Ubuntu 24.04).

alacritty.toml keeps import and live_config_reload at the root rather than under [general]: that section only exists in Alacritty 0.14+, and older versions discard the whole unknown section (Unused config key: general), silently taking the local-override import with it. 0.14+ still honours the root-level keys, just with a deprecation warning.