I liked Zach Holman's post on dotfiles as well as his topical project structure, so I forked it...even though it doesn't include a ton of his customizations.
git clone git://github.com/griswold/dotfiles ~/.dotfilescd ~/.dotfilesrake full_install
The full_install rake task will fetch any submodule dependencies,
compile any plugins with native extensions (as in command-t), and
symlink the appropriate files in .dotfiles to your home directory.
Once you have done a full_install, you can just run install in the future
if you need to re-symlink the files for any reason.
Everything's built around topic areas. If you're adding a new area to your
forked dotfiles — say, "Java" — you can simply add a java directory and put
files in there. Anything with an extension of .zsh will get automatically
included into your shell. Anything with an extension of .symlink will get
symlinked without extension into $HOME when you run rake install.
There's a few special files in the hierarchy.
- bin/: Anything in
bin/will get added to your$PATHand be made available everywhere. - topic/*.sh: Any files ending in
.shget loaded into your environment. - topic/*.symlink: Any files ending in
*.symlinkget symlinked into your$HOME. This is so you can keep all of those versioned in your dotfiles but still keep those autoloaded files in your home directory. These get symlinked in when you runrake install. - topic/*.completion.sh: Any files ending in
completion.shget loaded last so that they get loaded after we set up zsh autocomplete functions.