DOTS

DOTS is a framework for ZSH that helps you manage your dot-files, ZSH sugar functionality, and your general shell experience. It began its life as a fork off the popular Oh My ZSH framework. It has similar design philosophies and functionality, but different goals. Where Oh My ZSH is meant for new users to get more acclamated with ZSH, DOTS is meant for the slightly more advanced user who wants the built-in functionality of Oh My ZSH but wants a bit more additional customization. It also includes some extra tools that help with day-to-day shell management tasks.

Features

  • Modular plugin architecture inspired by Oh My ZSH, but using Antigen for greater efficiency. Only code that's specific to your repo needs to be in your repo.
  • Simplified prompt string themeing in the lib/dots/prompt.zsh directory.
  • Configuration persistence via the persist command. This copies your dot-files to the config/ directory and allows you to optionally store them in Git. Add your persisted configs to your fork's .gitignore if you don't want them synchronized, and forget them when you don't want them symlinked anymore. Keeping your configuration files in a place that's easily accessible with a text editor helps you keep an eye on your configuration.
  • Aliases for common shell functionality like searching for a running process, opening your text editor, viewing files with a pager, setting the title of the current iTerm tab, optimizing your OS X environment, and much more.
  • Environment boostrapping, installs a global gemset and a series of programs through Homebrew (as well as Homebrew itself) that aid in your day-to-day programming tasks.

Installation

Unlike Oh My ZSH, DOTS is installed as a gem.

Just run the following commands:

$ gem install zsh_dots
$ dots install

This will fork the repo to ~/.dots, and symlink all of the files in ~/.dots/config to your home directory as dotfiles (unless existing ones are found).

Problems?

You might need to modify your $PATH in ~/.zshrc if you're not able to find some commands after switching to DOTS.

Usage

There are a number of commands built in to the DOTS binary. They can be used anywhere the binary is available, so make sure you install DOTS to your global RVM gemset.

persist DOT_FILE

You can persist any dot file with DOTS. Simply run this command on the file...it will copy the file to your $DOTS folder and symlink that new file in its original place, preserving your settings in a git repository but making it accessible for the application needing to use it.

forget DOT_FILE

The opposite of persist. Deletes the symlink and restores your file. For when you just need to fuggeddaboutit...

osx-bootstrap

This alias simply sources the ~/.dots/config/osx.zsh file, and provides a number of OS X 10.8 enhancements I've found useful. Check through the file, read its comments, and make sure you're not doing anything to the computer you don't want to, then run this command for some useful OS X defaults. This script is based off [OSX for Hackers][o4h], which I found useful but somewhat overwhelming in what it did, so I slimmed it down to fit my needs.

set_title TO_STRING

Sets the title of the iTerm window to the String you pass in.

o, v and e

These three commands open, view and edit files, respectively. They use the Finder (OS X only), whatever you set as your $PAGER and whatever you set as your $EDITOR to do their tasks. Merely aliases, these conventions are prime examples of how DOTS is constructed. They all use sensible defaults, for example o will open the current directory, but o ~/Code will open up ~/Code in the Finder. e follows suit, but v throws an error as this should almost never be the case.

dots

The DOTS binary is another useful tool in your shell adventures. Invoke dots help to check out what it does. This binary is most useful for updating the DOTS framework from source and bootstrapping the environment on new installs.

Hidden Configuration

In many cases, programmers want to keep some sensible defaults checked in to their DOTS repo, but may need to keep their own personal key and certificate settings private. In this case, you can simply put those values in a ~/.dots/config/file.zsh. These files are ignored both by Git and by DOTS when it symlinks configuration into the repo. In your application's dotfile, insert the following line to load configuration from your untracked file:

hidden_config_for 'file'

This will run the following shell command:

$ source $DOTS/config/$1.zsh

where $1 is the first argument given to the function.

Environment Bootstrapping

DOTS installs a number of programs for you:

  • HTTPie for querying HTTP, and displaying the results in a colorful format.
  • Vim for text editing. It fits into the DOTS philosophy very nicely of having each program do one thing really well.
  • The latest version of the Ruby programming language. We believe that you should keep your tools up to date, and Homebrew has been very reliable in maintaining the latest version of Ruby, as Homebrew is itself a Ruby project. It's also a great shell scripting language, among other things...
  • Ruby on Rails. I'm a Rails developer, so having Rails in the global Gemfile is a must. If this offends you, you may kindly remove the gem as it isn't really necessary for your use. However, this framework is bundled with a number of aliases/plugins for use in Rails projects, so I felt like including Rails makes the whole thing "complete".
  • AWS Developer Tools for interfacing with Amazon Web Services. I use AWS to host all of my projects, both at work and at home, and these tools make it very easy to get statistics on your instances quickly.
  • Git is my favorite distributed version control system, and I use it on all of my projects, both private and public. DOTS also installs a number of plugins for Git that I find useful: git_tracker for automatically including a Pivotal Tracker issue number in commits when your branch follows a specific naming convention, git-process for managing a strict feature branch-based workflow, and hub for easy interfacing with Github (allowing you to clone with a simple short Github URL: git clone tubbo/dots, make pull requests and edit them in Vim, define issues, and fork projects). With the exception of hub all of these gems are completely optional, and must be installed explicitly in each new project (as they add Git hooks).

License

DOTS is released under The MIT License:

Copyright (c) 2012 Tom Scott

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person 
obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files
(the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction,
including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge,
publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software,
and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so,
subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND 
NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS
BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN
ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN
CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Contributing

To contribute to the project, fork it and send me a pull request!

I accept either traditional email pulls or Github pull requests.