Really Good Dotfiles

Sun, 20 Jul 2025 13:16:00 +0000

I’ve always struggled to maintain clean, useful dotfiles for myself. Somehow, they work amazingly one day, and then I have to do a clean install, and everything is broken.

I finally sat down with Claude and fixed (almost) all the mess.

Here’s what I came up with. My prompts were roughly: “I want feature x, here are the docs on it, please implement,” and I’d link to a raw markdown doc.

Favourite Features

FZF Lots of Things

Ctrl-R gives me a fuzzy finder for history. This is out-of-the-box fzf functionality, but I never took the time to set it up.

Ctrl+T to find files and `Alt+C to change to the selected directory.

fco gives me fzf fuzzy finding to check out a branch.

Zoxide for `cd`

I’ve used zoxide before, but Claude suggested aliasing cd to z. So much nicer! I find the z key difficult to hit, especially when switching between regular keyboards and an ortholinear one. cd is just muscle memory.

Starship with the current weather

Location 16°C Overcast ↑7km/h
in dotfiles on main
❯ |

This is overkill. But neat. I have a launchd task that updates a weather cache every 30 minutes. Starship reads from that file. If the file is stale, it triggers the launchd task, causing the following new prompt to display the updated weather.

I used wttr to fetch the weather for my current location.

install.sh

Previously, my installation script would overwrite any existing dotfiles. Now it can make backups, start, stop, and continue at different places. It can also execute only specific installation steps. This way, I don’t need to install all the brew packages to get a recent update from one machine onto another.

Conclusion

Take a look at my dotfiles if you’d like. Updating your dotfiles is a great way to learn to work with an agent. Generally, Claude was proficient at making individual updates, but sometimes struggled to connect the parts. We worked together to debug the issues and find a configuration that worked nicely for me.

Help! VS Code isn't Using the Right Shell!

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I recently switched from vim to VS Code because so much of the setup was easier. I still miss some of the simplicity of vim, but in the end VS Code lets me focus more on my work and less on configuration.

Unless that configuration is the shell VS code uses in the background! I kept running into issues where Shopify’s Ruby LSP couldn’t access rbenv or Rubocop couldn’t be found, or worse git hooks weren’t being executed!

I finally found the solution in this GitHub issue. Short answer: “Go to System Settings -> Privacy & Security -> Full Disk Access -> Toggle Visual Studio Code on”

Failed to activate Ruby · Issue #587 · Shopify/vscode-ruby-lsp

Development-Environment on enumerator.dev