I love dotfiles.

“Dotfiles” is a term that refers to configuration files used to configure
software and operating systems. They are called such because often these files
start with a dot. You may have seen
.bashrc,
.tmux.conf or
.zshrc in the wild.

Whenever a software doesn’t offer direct file-based configuration, I feel sad
because it means I need to take extra steps to keep my configuration across
different devices in sync or when setting up a new machine.

I love sharing.

I regularly publish ideas and experiences in
my blog, I share my notes in
my digital garden
and I publish almost all the code I write (outside work) as open source
in GitHub.

I love to read
other people’s dotfiles
and learn from them.

Yet, somehow I feel like sharing my own dotfiles to the world is beyond my
comfort zone. I feel my customisations and aliases and other decisions are too
intimate and personal to share.

I don’t quite know why though.

I have a really cool repository where I keep my dotfiles and there’s quite a
lot there. There’s the usual suspects like my
zsh config and aliases, my
tmux configuration and my
neovim and
vscode stuff too. And my
Python startup script.

I also keep my
Homebrew core list
there: that’s all the packages I want to always have at hand. Having them all
in one place to be installed with a single command on a new computer is
lovely.

I also keep my
Stylus
CSS rules there so I can easily bring the experience I want on any browser I
use.

I use
GNU Stow to manage most of these. For anything that’s directly applicable by copying the files into a given
folder, I’ve set up the folder structure so that running
stow [folder] will create symlinks to
right places: any change made into the repository from any machine will apply
to all machines. It’s so cool.

All in all, my dotfiles repository is home to 19 configuration files +
everything my neovim installation has, plugins and all.

For now however, I
keep them secret, keep them safe until I
feel better about sharing my dotfiles with the world.

If something above resonated with you, let’s start a discussion about it! Email me at juhamattisantala at gmail dot com and share your thoughts. In 2025, I want to have more deeper discussions with people from around the world and I’d love if you’d be part of that.