dots

One repo, one script, any Mac or Linux box.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/clzmj/dots/main/setup.sh | sh

Idempotent. Anything it displaces goes to ~/.dots-backup/<timestamp>/.

How it works

Files are symlinked, not copied — so there is no source state, no target state, no apply. Edit ~/.config/helix/config.toml and you have edited the repo. Commit and push; that's the whole workflow.

home/      mirrors $HOME exactly — home/.config/git/config -> ~/.config/git/config
packages.txt                    what gets installed
setup.sh                        installs, links, asks two questions

Re-run setup.sh (or sysupdate) after pulling to pick up new files.

No templating

Two mechanisms replace it:

• Shell config branches at runtime on $OSTYPE.
• Everything else uses its own include mechanism — [include] in git, Include in ssh.

The one exception is home/.config/helix/languages.toml.in: helix won't expand ~, so setup.sh expands @HOME@ into ~/.config/helix/languages.toml. That file is generated, not linked.

What it asks

Five questions, each answered by the first of: a DOTS_* env var, a cached answer, your typed reply, the default.

Full name (git commits) [Carlos Lezama]:
Email (git commits)     [carlos@example.com]:
Terminal font           [JetBrainsMonoNL Nerd Font Mono]:
Terminal font size      [12]:
Theme (helix + herdr)   [vesper]:

Answers cache to ~/.config/dots/answers, so re-runs are silent. With no tty (or DOTS_YES=1) it takes the defaults and never blocks.

If a file already exists, it lists the conflicts and asks once whether to replace them. Declining keeps your files and links everything else.

Testing

sh test.sh

Runs the whole matrix against throwaway homes — never touches your real $HOME. Safe inside a container as a non-root user. Validated on macOS, Debian 13, Fedora 44 and Arch.

Nothing private is in here

No SSH keys, no AWS credentials, no encrypted blobs, no identity. setup.sh asks for a git name and email once and writes ~/.config/git/local, which is [include]d and never committed. That is the only prompt.

Machine-specific shell bits: drop a ~/.config/zsh/local.zsh — the loader globs the directory, and it isn't tracked.

Git lives in ~/.config/git/

config, ignore, and attributes — git finds all three there by convention, so core.excludesFile and core.attributesFile aren't set.

zprofile exports GIT_CONFIG_GLOBAL, which matters: git reads ~/.gitconfig after the XDG file and lets it win, so a stray git config --global would silently shadow everything here. With GIT_CONFIG_GLOBAL set, --global writes to the right file and ~/.gitconfig never comes back.

packages.sh

Not a config format — a shell script. sh -n packages.sh checks it, and the install commands are written out per platform exactly as you would type them:

case $PLATFORM in            # darwin | debian | fedora | arch
debian)
  sudo apt-get install -y zsh git curl ripgrep eza fzf jq git-delta ...
  have fd  || deb sharkdp/fd  'fd_${V}_${DEB_ARCH}.deb'
  have bat || deb sharkdp/bat 'bat_${V}_${DEB_ARCH}.deb'
  ;;
esac

Helpers: have, deb, rpm, bin, tarbin, helix_release, go_release, go_install, bun_install. Single-quote a release asset name and use ordinary shell variables in it — $V, $DEB_ARCH, $RPM_ARCH, $ARCH, $ARCH2.

The platform's own packages come first, because they provide the curl, unzip and xz that the vendor installers below them need — bun's aborts outright without unzip.

Verified installing every tool on Debian 13, Fedora 44 and Arch, with no Homebrew anywhere.

Traps this encodes

• Debian renames binaries: fd-find→fdfind, bat→batcat. Both would break alias cat='bat', so those take upstream's .deb instead.
• apt install delta installs a completely unrelated tool.
• Arch calls the GitHub CLI github-cli, and names helix's binary helix because hex already owns hx.
• helix without its runtime/ directory starts up silently broken.
• bottom is in no Debian or Fedora repo and its binary is btm.
• bun's globals need a JS runtime, and bun is it — no node install required.

No templating

There are no .in files and no placeholders. Config values are simply committed, because these files are symlinks into the repo — editing ~/.config/helix/config.toml is editing the repo, so a template would only protect you from the thing the design already makes trivial.

Tool configs live where each tool natively looks for them — ~/.config/ruff/ruff.toml and ~/.config/sqlfluff/.sqlfluff — so nothing needs an absolute path baked in, and per-project configs take precedence the way they should.

The only generated file is ~/.config/git/local, from two prompts.

Scripts

Standalone helpers live in home/.local/bin/ as real executables, not shell functions: www, blame-menu, kserver, notify, tree, sysupdate, and machine-report.

nd and rehash-completions stay functions in home/.config/zsh/ because they have to act on the calling shell — a subprocess cannot cd for you or run compinit in your shell.

No oh-my-zsh

Startup went 170ms → ~70ms. omz's git plugin was the only part earning its keep; the eight aliases actually used live in home/.config/zsh/git.zsh, and the directory aliases in home/.config/zsh/nav.zsh.

zshrc runs compinit -C, which skips the completion-dump staleness check — that check alone was 114ms. Run rehash-completions after installing tools that ship new completions.