Dotfiles

Reasons

These are the common dotfiles that I maintain. A repo for all the dotfiles is beneficial to the maintainability and portability. On a new machine, the developer can simply clone the repo and install. Then they will have the same develop environment. This post by Anish Athalye (who is also a very successful research in MIT PDOS) explains the necessity to manage one's dotfile in a unified way.

Dependency

The dotfiles will be deployed each time on a brand new machine so it is important for developers to manage them easily. The dotfiles should not contain many dependency that complicates the maintenance. In this repo, I use the dotbot as the management suite which is lightweight and self-contained.

Here is the link to the dotbot

• dotbot

Installation

1. First install zsh and required fonts: ./install-zsh.sh
   Known issues: If the machine is using LDAP authentication by PAM or something, which means that you login to the machine as a domain user, you might not be able to change the default shell by chsh in the install-zsh.sh. Here is a workaround:
   Add this code snippet to ~/.profile:

# Run zsh
if [ "$SHELL" != "/usr/bin/zsh" ]
then
    export SHELL="/usr/bin/zsh"
    exec /usr/bin/zsh
fi

2. Install prerequistes: sudo apt-get install python-dev python3-dev python-is-python3 cmake
3. Install dotfiles: ./install
   Known issues: If the ycmd server is not working, you may have to go to the installation folder and install it.

cd ~/.vim/plugged/YouCompleteMe && python3 install.py