GitHub ❤ ~/

Why would I want my dotfiles on GitHub?

• Backup, restore, and sync the prefs and settings for your toolbox. Your dotfiles might be the most important files on your machine.
• Learn from the community. Discover new tools for your toolbox and new tricks for the ones you already use.
• Share what you’ve learned with the rest of us.

Get started with a bootstrap

If you’re just starting out, before you go symlinking everything in ~/*, you may want to check out a few bootstrap projects that take the heavy lifting out of the process. Here are a few of our favorites:

• Abdullah’s dotfiles
• Abhishek Keshri’s Dotfiles has configurations for zsh with custom Powerlevel9k prompt, vim, git, tmux, compiz etc. It also has a branch for Termux. Comes with a handy setup script.
• Adam Eivy’s dotfiles are focused on Automation (no manual install/config) for ZSH and macOS with a friendly bot to guide your way.
• Aditya Pillai’s Jumpstart is a user-tailored customizable bootstrap installation script for macOS (formerly Mac OS X). Jumpstart is a fully-fledged tool that quickly installs a development setup to your macOS computer and replaces the need for manually setting up dotfiles. Jumpstart implements the best practices and setups for all-around development environment.
• [aeolyus’s dotfiles] (https://github.com/aeolyus/dotfiles) simple dotfiles managed with GNU stow
• Anders Ballegaard’s dotfiles Mostly custom aliases I find useful for network engineering, and Python development. Oh and it updates automatically
• Andrew Schwartzmeyer’s dotfiles use GNU Stow (like xero’s) for symlink management, and git-subtree for repository integration.
• Artem Sapegin’s dotfiles with custom ZSH and Terminal/iTerm themes and useful aliases for web developers.
• Ashish Bhatia’s dotfiles focus on Android development, reverse engineering and blockchain (crypto currencies) development on macOS.
• Awesome dotfiles contains articles, tools and other resources to get you up to speed with dotfiles.
• bashdot A minimalist dotfile management framework, written 100% in bash.
• Ben Alman’s dotfiles support different configurations per OS, linking, copying and environment setup.
• Bradford Dabbs’s dotfiles uses a simple shell script to setup bash-it and vim-plug along with the solarized color scheme and aliases for Bro NSM.
• Darryl Abbate’s dotfiles can be installed with a single curl command for absolutely effortless setup on a fresh macOS machine.
• Diki Ananta’s dotfiles is focused on Window Manager users, especially for i3, and Web developers. It has various configs for standard of window manager.
• dotphiles are a community driven framework of dotfiles, for the usual terminal apps and shells, designed to work across multiple platforms and degrade for older versions of software or OS, allowing you to use the same settings on all your machines.
• Dries Vints’ dotfiles leverages Brew and mackup to setup an entire macOS environment.
• Eduardo Lundgren’s dotfiles, the first JavaScript-based dotfiles powered by Grunt.
• F-dotfiles is an opinionated dotfiles organization scheme based on GNU Stow. Highest priorities are ease of maintenance and deployment on both Linux and macOS.
• Felix Volny’s dotconfig is a one-script install to setup a complete JavaScript development environment on MacOS, including tmux, neovim, ZSH, and iterm2 configuration.
• Huy Vo’s dotfiles, a lightweight yet powerful dotfiles for MacOS users. It uses GNU Stow to manage the symlinks, ZSH as the shell environment and Nvim + Tmux for the coding (along with other useful tools).
• Ian Langworth’s dotfiles are designed to work on any platform and be kept in sync across different hosts. With plenty of useful shell aliases and command defaults, it features a simple install script to install itself and stay up-to-date.
• John Wyatt’s Chef Dotfile Manager Tutorial - This is a complete bootstrap to get a Chef dotfile manager running on a Linux system with examples for packages, templates, and setting up the Atom text editor + Atom packages + Atom configuration.
• Jeff Coffler’s dotfiles has a bootstrap script that symlinks and doesn’t require “.” (hidden file) in the repo. The repo itself can live anywhere.
• jh3y’s kody is a dotfiles runner/manager written with node inspired by Zach Holman’s popular dotfiles.
• Jonas Devlieghere’s dotfiles for both macOS and Linux has a little bit of everything for compiler development in the terminal.
• Koen Vendrik’s dotfiles are a collection of aliases and methods that are most useful for speeding up a front-end web development workflow. They speed up many different processes, from working with Git and Github to converting screen recordings into gifs and managing network processes.
• kornicameister’s dotfiles started as a collection of manually creafted bash scripts slowing moving toward proper dotfiles utilizing ZSH (with Prezto), Pyenv, Nodenv, Terminator, Git and VIM/Neovim configuration. Everything controlled via dotbot and automated down to generating GPG key to sign commit, upgrading local environment via own binary and dependencies management via dependabot.
• kutsan’s dotfiles includes ongoing configuration files for various interfaces and text-based command-line applications such as vim, ZSH, tmux, ranger, mutt, newsboat and more.
• Mathias Bynens’ dotfiles includes a bootstrap script that rsyncs your repo to your home folder. Mathias’ macOS defaults script is legendary.
• Matt Smith’s dotfiles includes a one-liner install, fish, vscode, mac desktop app installs via brew cask, os x customizations inspired by Mathias, etc. No dotfiles framework, just shell scripts to set everything up.
• mihaliak’s dotfiles for macOS focused on Web development
• Mohit Singh’s dotfiles has a lightweight setup for JavaScript development environment on macOS.
• neeasade’s dotfiles utilize a template based theming system, with the ability to switch between themes without restarting programs.
• Nelson Estevão’s dotfiles uses a modular repository structure. It features configuration files for popular software like neovim, ZSH and i3wm. Just delete the directories that you are not interested and run install.sh.
• Nick Plekhanov’s dotfiles features properly customized ZSH and iTerm environments, along with Atom editor and Webstorm IDE. As a bonus, included is a set of useful aliases for web developers.
• Nikita Sobolev’s dotfiles contains Python, Node, and Elixir configurations for macOS alongside with the most user-friendly command line tools for the developer happiness.
• Overbryd’s dotfiles features a 0-100 macOS bootstrap and topical setup maintained with a simple Makefile
• Paul Miller’s dotfiles feature greatly customized ZSH with auto-completion and syntax highlighting, a bunch of useful Git extras and colourful themes for macOS Terminal and Sublime Text.
• posquit0’s dotfiles contains awesome configurations for CLI commands and X environments, along with powerfully customized Vim, ZSH and Tmux environments for nerds.
• ridhwaans’s dotfiles has dotfiles and a ZSH environment setup built for macOS High Sierra and WSL (Windows 10 Creators Update with Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark))
• Rosco Kalis’ dotfiles feature Fish shell configuration with custom completions, as well as comprehensive package management, repository management and Hammerspoon configuration.
• Voku’s dotfiles dotfiles for Bash (Linux) / ZSH (Linux) / Git Bash (Windows) / Cygwin (Windows) / Bash on Ubuntu on Windows.
• xero’s dotfiles are managed with GNU Stow, a free, portable, lightweight symlink farm manager.
• Yan Pritzker’s dotfiles bundles an opinionated set of Vim plugins and ZSH setup all tuned for using Solarized on macOS.
• Zach Holman’s dotfiles features topical organization, auto sourcing ZSH files, easy ZSH completion extensions, and a local bin folder for executables. The included Rakefile will symlink anything ending in .symlink to your ~ folder.

Go further with a framework

For a lot of us, a big chunk of our ~ folder is devoted to our shell and our text editor. Until you’re ready to roll your own setup, these projects make customization safe and easy.

Shells

• Liquid Prompt is a full-featured and carefully designed adaptive prompt for Bash and ZSH.

Bash

• bash-it is a “shameless ripoff of oh-my-zsh,” but for bash.

Fish

• Fisher A package manager for the fish shell.
• Oh My Fish is a fish-shell framework inspired by oh-my-zsh.

ZSH

Frameworks

• Antibody is a shell plugin manager made from the ground up thinking about performance.
• antigen-hs is an antigen-inspired ZSH plugin manager that tries to do work statically and only on manual invocation, minimizing the ZSH startup time. Antigen-hs is much more minimalistic and emphasizes convention over configuration more strongly than antigen.
• antigen is a framework for using plugins and themes in your ZSH configuration. It will automatically clone repositories containing the plugins you’re using without you having to manually create submodules or clones, and supports using oh-my-zsh plugins and themes as well as ones published as separate repositories.
• chezmoi makes it easy to manage your dotfiles across multiple machines, securely.
• dotzsh strives to be platform and version independent, some functionality may be lost when running under older versions of ZSH, but it should degrade cleanly and allow you to use the same setup on multiple machines of differing OS’s without problems.
• oh-my-zsh is a community-driven framework for managing your ZSH configuration. It bundles 40+ plugins and 80+ themes.
• Prezto is a configuration framework for ZSH. It’s a lightweight alternative to oh-my-zsh with sane defaults, aliases, functions, auto completion, prompt themes and dozens of well documented modules.
• slimzsh is a small starter framework for ZSH that features the pure prompt, syntax highlighting and tab completion.
• toasty-zsh is a simplistic ZSH plugin and configuration system that aims to provide a “sane defaults” set for any ZSH config and is optimized for system-wide installation
• zgen is a lightweight plugin manager for ZSH inspired by Antigen. The goal is to have a minimal overhead when starting up the shell because nobody likes waiting. Zgen will also automatically handle cloning repositories for plugins you’re using without you manually maintaining submodules or clones, and can use oh-my-zsh formatted plugins and themes.
• zplug is a next-generation plugin manager for ZSH. There is more to a ZSH plugin manager than increasing its speed. Also, there is nothing that zplug cannnot do.

ZSH Resources

• awesome-zsh-plugins is a list of ZSH plugins, themes and completions compatible with Zsh frameworks like antigen, oh-my-zsh and zgen.
• zsh-quickstart-kit A quickstart for zgen. It includes zgen setup, a starter list of plugins, the zsh-users/zsh-completions collection, and the bullet-train theme.

Editors

Emacs

• Cask is a package manager for Emacs.
• Prelude is an enhanced Emacs 24 distribution that should make your experience with Emacs both more pleasant and more powerful.
• Spacemacs is a Emacs 24 distribution that builds on Evil-mode with ports of popular Vim plugins to closer emulate a Vim environment.
• use-package is a declaration macro for simplifying your .emacs

Vim

• dotvim is a community driven framework for vim.
• Janus is a distribution of plugins and mappings for Vim, Gvim and MacVim.
• Neobundle is a next generation Vim plugin manager.
• Pathogen is a plugin manager for Vim.
• spf13-vim is Steve Francia’s Vim distribution of vim plugins and resources for Vim, Gvim and MacVim.
• vim-plug is a simple plugin manager that supports parallel installations / upgrades.
• Vundle is short for Vim Bundle and is a plugin manager for Vim. It works with Pathogen compatible vim plugins.

General-purpose dotfile utilities

• Bonclay is a simple dotfiles manager. Well, technically, it is a backup/restore/sync tool magiggy.
• Config Curator defines your dotfile installation in a simple but powerful config file. Sync files, directories, and symlinks across multiple environments with this ludicrous-speed Node.js successor to the original Ruby version.
• Dotbot is a lightweight standalone tool to bootstrap dotfiles, making it easy to have a “one click” installation/upgrade process for your dotfiles.
• dotdrop makes the management of dotfiles between different hosts easy. It allows to store your dotfiles on git and automagically deploy different versions on different setups.
• dotfiler is inspired by homesick and Zach Holman’s dotfiles, made using principle of KISS.
• dotfiles.sh by Trevor King. Dotfiles.sh manages multiple dotfile repositories so you can keep your public and private configuration separate. It also supports locally patching your dotfiles before symlinking to adapt to the local machine. Dotfile repositories may be fetched via either Git or (where Git is not available) wget.
• dotgit by Kobus van Schoor. A comprehensive and versatile dotfiles manager which helps to synchronize your dotfiles between multiple computers and devices.
• Dotsync utility for syncing dotfiles between multiple machines from a Git repo or push using rsync.
• dotty by Vibhav Pant. dotty uses a simple JSON-formatted file to symlink and/or copy your dotfiles. It can also execute shell commands and check for directories, and create them accordingly.
• Ellipsis is a package manager for dotfiles.
• exogenesis by Lucas Dohmen. exogenesis uses a simple YAML-formatted file to symlink your dotfiles and install npms/bundlers.
• fresh is a tool to source dotfiles from others into your own. It supports shell configuration (aliases, functions, etc.) as well as config files (e.g. ackrc and gitconfig). Think of it as Bundler for your dotfiles.
• Ghar by Brandon Philip. Ghar is a standalone Python script for managing Git repos symlinked into your home.
• GNU Stow is a symlink farm manager, useful for automatically (and safely) linking your dotfiles folder into your home directory.
• Homely helps you script your dotfile installation using Python. If you’re getting frustrated by the limitations of pure shell scripts, then this is the tool for you. Homely also has a clever Automatic Cleanup feature and good tutorials.
• Home Manager by Robert Helgesson is a system built for managing NixOS user environments using the Nix package manager and the Nixpkgs libraries.
• Homemaker by Alex Yatskov. Homemaker is a standalone tool written in Golang to manage both common and machine-specific dotfile settings. Homemaker can be configured in TOML, YAML or JSON.
• Homeshick by Anders Ingemann is like Homesick but written in bash. Great to combine with myrepos.
• Homesick, by Josh Nichols. Homesick makes it easy to symlink and clone dotfiles repos.
• myrepos is a tool to manage all your version control repositories at once.
• Pearl is a brand new revolutionary package manager that allows to automatically activate dotfiles whenever shells or editors start via a smart hook mechanism. Dotfiles are treated as packages that coexist together seamlessly and can be fully controlled and synced across different systems. There is a wide range of packages already available in the Official Pearl Hub.
• rcm is a set of well-documented shell scripts that help manage your dotfiles. It is easily installable on macOS with the homebrew package manager, but works on all Unix operating systems.
• shallow-backup - shallow-backup lets you easily create lightweight backups of installed packages, applications, fonts and dotfiles, and automatically push them to a remote Git repository.
• shprofile - shprofile manages a set of shell profiles which can be enabled at any time. Script execution is done within the current shell session, so scripts can modify the current shell environment.
• stowsh is a clone of GNU Stow written in bash with minimal dependencies.
• vcsh by Richard “RichiH” Hartmann. vcsh manages all your dotfiles in Git without the need for symlinks. Any number of Git repositories will co-exist in parallel in your $HOME without interfering with each other. Advanced use cases with different branches for different systems are supported by default. An extensive hook system lets you customize your repositories. vcsh includes batch push, pull, and status commands which operate on all your repositories at once.
• yadm by Tim Byrne. yadm is a dotfile management tool with 3 main features: Manages files across systems using a single Git repository. Provides a way to use alternate files on a specific OS or host. Supplies a method of encrypting confidential data so it can safely be stored in your repository.
• The Super User Spark is a declarative domain specific language that allows you to specify the deployment of your dotfiles. It also includes a compiler and interpreter for the language.
• yadoma by Valentin Haenel. yadoma is a simple dotfile management tool that uses YAML as configuration syntax and the pile-of-symlinks approach. It can manage multiple hosts, supports variable symlink targets and is infinitely hackable.

Tutorials

• Lars Kappert wrote a tutorial about getting started using a dotfiles repository.
• Anish Athalye wrote a guide on dotfiles management highlighting organizational approaches, installation tools, and general tips and tricks.
• Wes Bos has a series of free videos introducing ZSH, oh-my-zsh, and z.
• Dries Vints wrote an extensive blog post on why and how he created his dotfiles.
• Michael J. Smalley wrote a popular blog post with an associated git repo that includes a dotfiles installer script.
• Rosco Kalis wrote an article about setting up dotfiles, and a second one specifically about his automated repository management.
• Dmitry Geurkov wrote an article about his tool called dotcentral.

Don’t ignore your .gitignore

GitHub has a great collection of .gitignore templates for a wide range of languages and editors. We recommend Simon Whitaker’s gitignore-boilerplates to help you manage them.

Embrace submodules / subtrees

Consider using Git submodules as you start to add 3^rd party frameworks, scripts, and plugins. Submodules make managing dotfile dependencies so much easier.

If you get fed up with submodules, many people prefer git-subtree, which lets you merge subtrees (other repositories) into one Git repository, and later split and push changes back out.

FAQ

Why create this site?

Some of your fellow GitHub friends have found incredible value in digging through Other People’s Dotfiles (OPD). We aim to share that knowledge with you, our fellow wayfaring stranger in the shell.

You totally need to know about a great bootstrap or framework, how do I submit?

Great! We’re always looking for new projects to follow. Please submit a PR or an Issue.

Oh no! I’ve committed passwords/API keys/other sensitive data!

We’ve got you covered! Take a look at the sensitive data removal guide.

Your FAQ is weak. It so did not answer my question.

That’s not a question. But feel free to ask us anything on Twitter, or to create an issue on this repository. Maybe we can expand this list.

Contribute

Want to help out? Great! Submit a feature request, open an issue, or submit a patch.