dotfiles

Portable shell configuration, synced across Debian and macOS machines.

Everything in $HOME is a symlink back into this repo, so editing a file here changes it everywhere the repo is checked out.

Install

git clone git@git.edwork.org:edwork/dotfiles ~/Projects/dotfiles
cd ~/Projects/dotfiles && ./dotfiles.sh

Existing real files are moved to ~/.dotfiles-backup/<timestamp>/ before being replaced — nothing is overwritten in place.

Updating

dotfiles          # pull, re-link, reload the current shell

The script is idempotent — run it as often as you like. A link that is already correct is left alone silently, so a quiet run means the machine is in sync. This is also how new files reach existing machines: add a line to LINKS in dotfiles.sh and the next run picks it up.

DRY_RUN=1 ~/.dotfiles.sh prints what would happen without touching anything.

Automatic updates

.zshrc and .bashrc check the mtime of ~/.edworkdotfiles on shell startup and run dotfiles if it is more than 30 days old.

File	Effect
~/.edworkdotfiles	Sentinel; its mtime is the 30-day clock. Touched on every run.
~/.edworkoffline	Kill switch. If present, auto-update never runs. disableupdate creates it.

A failed git pull (offline, diverged) is a warning, not an error — links are still reconciled from whatever is on disk. Git runs with BatchMode and a 5-second connect timeout so an unreachable server can never hang a new terminal.

Per-machine customisation

~/.local_aliases is created empty on first run, sourced last by both shells, and is not tracked. Machine-specific aliases, paths, and secrets belong there.

What's here

File	Links to
.aliases	~/.aliases — shared aliases and functions for both shells
.bashrc / .bash_profile	~/.bashrc, ~/.bash_profile
.zshrc	~/.zshrc
.gitconfig	~/.gitconfig — only when $USER is edwork
.htoprc	~/.config/htop/htoprc
.tmux.conf	~/.tmux.conf
.vimrc	~/.vimrc
.selected_editor	~/.selected_editor — Debian select-editor; inert elsewhere
dotfiles.sh	~/.dotfiles.sh

Shell history from both shells is unified into ~/.shell_history.

Many aliases (update, upgrade, memdiag, ports, ip) are Debian-only by design and are not expected to work on macOS.