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Nix shells

These are instructions for setting up ZSH, dotfiles, etc. These documents reference it:

Install Oh My Zsh

You’ll thank me later. (You’ll need ZSH installed for this to work.)

Run

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

You should be prompted to change your shell. If you are not, run

chsh -s $(which zsh)

Make sure it is set by running

sudo cat /etc/passwd | grep $USER

You may need to reboot for the change to your login shell to take effect. You should now have a colorful shell, complete with a plugin for Git.

.commonrc file

About .bash_profile, .zshenv, etc.
File Shell Read if shell is My advice
.profile sh † login delete
.bash_profile Bash ‡ login source .common-profile
.zprofile ZSH login source .common-profile
.bashrc Bash interactive and non-login source .commonrc
.zshrc ZSH interactive source .commonrc; set up ZSH
.zshenv ZSH non-interactive delete
.zlogout ZSH logging out use if needed
.common-profile multi N/A (sourced) set env vars
.commonrc multi N/A (sourced) add aliases, etc.

Footnotes:

  • † .profile is the original Bourne shell config file, but Bash will also read it if .bash_profile doesn’t exist.
  • ‡ The default .zprofile sources .bash_profile if it exists.

Further reading:

Create a new file, ~/.commonrc, and have ~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc, and any other Bash-compatible ~/.*rc files source it. Use ~/.commonrc to set up your environment variables, aliases, etc. This is a solid but extremely simple way to keep the shell configurations in sync.

I wrote a little script called commonrc-config.sh, which manages this nicely. It does nothing on its own; it just provides some functions. Run these commands:

mkdir -p ~/bin
wget https://dmyersturnbull.github.io/guide/commonrc-config.sh -O ~/bin/commonrc-config.sh
source ~/bin/commonrc-config.sh
commonrc::initialize
commonrc::add_to_rc bashrc # adds 'source $HOME/.commonrc'
commonrc::add_to_rc zshrc
commonrc::add_line 'source ~/bin/commonrc-config.sh'

If you want to include the Fish shell, run

mkdir -p ~/.config/fish/
commonrc::add_to_rc ~/.config/fish/config.fish
Info

commonrc-config.sh’s functions are just idempotent, so you won’t end up with multiple source lines, etc. Otherwise, it’s mostly equivalent to this:

printf 'source ~/.commonrc\n' | tee -a ~/.bashrc >> ~/.zshrc
printf 'export PATH="$PATH:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/sbin:$HOME/bin"\n' >> ~/.commonrc

Sudoers

The easiest way is to run

su #(1)!
usermod --append --gid sudo $USER
  1. This will require you to enter the root password.

See this sudoers guide for more info.

Dotfiles

First, make sure ~/bin exists and is in your PATH. (If you used commonrc-config.sh, it already did this).

Consider using a dotfile manager like chezmoi. You can let chezmoi manage your ~/.commonrc file, too.

Grab useful Bash scripts from awesome-dotfiles: Also see this simplified version of my .commonrc, which contains some useful functions and aliases.