Dotbot Is Really Nice

I LOVE looking at other people’s dotfiles. There’s something great about looking at how someone has set up their development environment, taking inspiration from them and learning new things. For example, I recently learned that in Neovim there’s a setting for using the system clipboard for yank and paste. I’ve been using a separate keymap for interacting with the system clipboard for years. I enabled this setting and it’s amazing. Now, when I yank text in Neovim, I can paste is into a slack channel and it just works!

I also love tinkering with my own dotfiles. Every so often I’ll look over things and add some conveniences like new aliases, or keymaps for Neovim. I’ve also created functions to make certain things easier(like automatically cd-ing into a git repo after cloning it).

Over the years, I’ve added various scripts to handle installing, linking, and setting up my dotfiles. These are mostly hand rolled shell scripts that link my dotfiles, install the applications I use, and configure git and Neovim on a new machine. My goal is to be able to run a single command, walk away, and come back to a fully set up machine.

It’s never quite worked that way, however. I’ve run into issues with the installer many times. These small quirks sent me debugging the scripts on every new machine setup.

I’ve written before about how I don’t consider myself a power user. While making a series of changes to my dotfiles this weekend, I decided to retire my aging install scripts in favor of using a ready made dotfiles manager. I chose to use Dotbot. Reader, let me tell you: Dotbot is really nice!

Dotbot is a little bit like ansible, but way lighter weight. It uses a YAML file to configure how your dotfiles should be linked in your home folder.

You install in into your dotfiles repo as a git submodule:

git submodule add https://github.com/anishathalye/dotbot
git config -f .gitmodules submodule.dotbot.ignore dirty

And copy the install script into your dotfiles root folder:

cp dotbot/tools/git-submodule/install .
touch install.conf.yaml

Since everything is configured using a YAML file, it makes understanding all your linked files really simple. For example, this is one of my configuration files:

- defaults:
    link:
        relink: true

- clean: ['~']

- link:
    ~/.aliases: aliases
    ~/.config/nvim: nvim
    ~/.gitignore_global: gitignore_global
    ~/.nvmrc: nvmrc
    ~/.ruby-version: ruby-version
    ~/.zsh_functions: zsh_functions
    ~/.zshenv: zshenv
    ~/.zshrc: zshrc

The link section sets up symlinks to various files and folders. The key is the target location and the value is where the link points to.

I’m also using a plugin called dotbot-brew that handles Homebrew packages as part of the Dotbot configuration. This is what my configuration for Homebrew looks like:

- install-brew: true

- tap:
    - homebrew/cask-fonts

- brew: 
    - neovim

- cask:
    - font-fira-code-nerd-font

- brewfile:
    - brew/home.brewfile

I set up my taps, packages and the brewfile from my previous dotfiles setup. This lets me have a single command to install all the packages I need.

So far, everything is working really well. I like Dotbot. It’s really simple to set up and it just works the way I expect. Sometimes you have to discard your custom stuff and use something off the shelf. I’m glad I could do that for my dotfiles setup.