Fiddling with dotfiles has made me learn many things. I learnt that data needs to organized well everywhere. When you make aliases or write functions for each type of tool that you use, you should organize it well.
I thank Holman for his set of dotfiles. They’re great and the kind of organization he has developed over there is remarkable. Over 700 people use his files and are making there own renditions. I am one of them and I am proud of it.
It’s great to use dotfiles because they are powerful, very powerful. And they make you learn a lot.
I had to make some changes for Holman’s dotfiles to work for me. The major problem I faced was the fact that I use oh-my-zsh and it has it’s own set of features to take care of. And then, Holman’s dotfiles work from the your cloned repo. To fix it, I changed one variable and introduced my own. $ZSH was changed to $ZSHDOT everywhere and I changed $ZSH to point to .oh-my-zsh and everything became peaceful. It really did give me a greater sense of peace once all of this was done, because now I could type in c to cd to my project folder. Similarly, h took me to my home. And if I need to add a new function, I can make a change in my repo and it will be done. If I feel someone has made a better feature, I can get it from their repo. It’s all collaborative and in a much bigger sense.
There’s so much that one can do with their dotfiles and I would recommend you try them out. If you’re a oh-my-zsh user like me, you might want to pick up mine.