dotfiles

Configuration for a bare-metal Ubuntu development laptop running i3.

OS:              Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (noble)
Window Manager:  i3
Bar:             polybar
Compositor:      picom
Terminal:        st (patched fork)
Shell:           bash
Editor:          nvim
File Manager:    lf

Layout

home/       files that link into ~
config/     directories that link into ~/.config
packages/   package lists and manual-install notes
hosts/      per-machine overlays, plus configs for dormant machines
install.sh  symlinks everything into place

install.sh creates symlinks, so edits to a linked file are edits to this repository. It backs up anything it would overwrite to ~/.dotfiles-backup/<timestamp>/.

./install.sh --dry-run   # show what would change
./install.sh             # link, prompting before replacing
./install.sh --force      # link, replacing without prompting

Packages are not installed automatically — see packages/.

Local and work settings

This repository is public, so nothing employer-specific lives in it. Work paths, internal hosts, AWS profiles and similar go in ~/.bash_work, which is untracked and sourced last by .bashrc:

[ -f "$HOME/.bash_work" ] && . "$HOME/.bash_work"

Because it is sourced last, it can also override anything defined in .bash_aliases or .bash_functions. Two functions are written with this in mind — gtp (commit and push) and asl (AWS SSO login) — with generic versions here and repo-specific ones layered on top locally.

.gitconfig follows the same pattern for user.email and similar: it [include]s ~/.gitconfig.local, an untracked file git silently ignores if absent. There's no repo-tracked "work" variant of this — an email address is enough to identify an employer, so it never touches git history, same as .bash_work.

A few values (currently just the external-monitor name in .xprofile) are genuinely just machine identity, not secrets, so they're handled differently: hosts/<name>/ can hold small overlay files (xprofile, so far) that install.sh offers as a "which machine is this?" prompt, remembered in ~/.dotfiles-host, or set directly with --host=NAME.

Shell

.bashrc loads in a fixed order: .bash_path (PATH and environment) → .bash_aliases → .bash_functions → .bash_prompt → nvm → .bash_work. .profile sources .bash_path directly so that non-interactive login shells still get a usable PATH.

Readline and tmux are both in vi mode.

Neovim

config/nvim/init.lua is the working config: treesitter-based highlighting, nvim-cmp completion, and LSP for TypeScript and Go. Plugins are managed by lazy.nvim, which bootstraps itself on first launch.

config/nvim/text-config.vim is a separate minimal prose-editing config (Goyo, no UI chrome), reachable through the tvim alias.

Installation details are in packages/manual.md.

Terminal

st is built from morgenfriedel/st with six patches (alpha, anysize, boxdraw, clipboard, scrollback, xresources). It is not vendored here — colors and transparency come from .Xresources, which .xprofile merges at login.

kitty.conf exists only to remap Ctrl-Tab and Ctrl-Shift-Tab into escape sequences Neovim can read, for buffer switching when kitty is used instead.

hosts/

hosts/<name>/ serves two different purposes depending on what it contains:

• Overlay files with a name install.sh recognizes (currently xprofile) are actively applied — see "Local and work settings" above.
• Everything else is reference-only. hosts/hypervisor/ holds configs for a Debian 12 KVM/QEMU hypervisor that is currently dormant, kept so the machine can be rebuilt, not actively synced.