Dotfiles

What’s a Dotfile?

Put simply, a dotfile is a configuration file that begins with a ., making it a hidden file. If you run ls -a ~ you’ll see a lot of hidden files, many of them being dotfiles. Some examples of dotfiles are .bashrc, .vimrc, and .initrc. As you can see from this list, many dotfiles also end with “rc”, so they’re sometimes referred to as “rc files.” People often ask what the “rc” stands for, and the general consensus is that it doesn’t matter. If that answer isn’t good enough for you, you may want to see this StackOverflow question.

Why do I care about dotfiles?

The terminal is a very polarizing interface. There’s one group of people that immediately take a liking to the text-based interface, and another that absolutely can’t stand it. Dotfiles help to bridge this gap.

Personalization

First, you can personalize just about anything with dotfiles. This includes the way your prompt looks, the way your command line behaves, what keyboard shortcuts do what, and more. The text-based nature of the terminal is powerful. Since you’re not limited by buttons, scroll bars, and other graphical widgets, you have near-complete control over the entire terminal experience. Once your terminal is personalized to your liking, you’ll notice a significant boost to your productivity, and you’ll be much more likely to actually enjoy working at the command prompt!

A significant portion of the customizations that you can set up deal with personalized shortcuts. Everyone has different workflows, which means different people will find that they do certain things over and over again. Dotfiles make it easy to set up shortcuts for oft-repeated tasks and actions, removing that much more friction from your terminal experience.

Settings and Initialization

On top of all this, some programs and terminal features need to have certain settings or options enabled to work correctly. To make sure that these options are always available, you can stick them into the appropriate dotfile so that the next time you launch that program all your required initializations have already been performed.

Of course, this whole discussion has been very abstract. In the next few lessons, we’ll deal with the specifics of how to get started configuring your terminal. Feel free to skip around; most Unix tools can be configured independently of each other. Remember that in most cases the Unix tool you’re using can be used to configure itself: your .bashrc is just another shell script, and your .vimrc is just another Vim script. At least for these two examples, anything you could normally run at the command line or in Vim you can also place into the appropriate dotfile.

Getting Started with Dotfiles

The best way to get started with dotfiles is to look at what other people are doing. Tens of thousands of people have open-sourced their dotfiles on GitHub, and GitHub has a whole page dedicated to getting started with dotfiles. The most popular repositories are well-commented, so just peruse the source and find things that look interesting. Happy hunting!