by Jon Allured on May 20, 2013

At Hashrocket we love our tools and pride ourselves on being good at using them. One way we go about getting good with these tools is by customizing them with some great configuration. Dot files are used by many programs to configure behavior and sharing these dot files on GitHub is a nice way for developers to have a consistent development environment.

We share our dot files in a project called Dotmatrix. Its been around for quite a while and been contributed to by many current and former Rocketeers. It's the distillation of the taste of quite a few very picky programmers. It's easy to install, upgrade and use all or just parts of it and there's lots of cool stuff in there even if you just want to read through it a little.

Dotmatrix is really two things:

1. A vehicle for keeping a set of dot files in sync
2. Version history of the contents of these dot files

It's the thing you use to install and upgrade a set of dot files and it's also a git repo of those actual dot files. Some of it concerns the installation and upgrading of these files and the rest of it is those actual dot files.

Every program is different, but for the most part, they have a load order for their configuration. Most support both a config file and a local version. Take your Z shell config--its specified in this file: ~/.zshrc, but if you have a file called ~/.zshrc.local, that local file will get a chance to override the normal version.

The bottom line is that you can inherit configuration in the ~/.zshrc and then have your local modifications in ~/.zshrc.local.

It's likely that you already have some configuration in your dot files, so before you install Dotmatrix, pull that configuration into a local version. Better yet, create a repo of those local dot files!

For example, if you already have some configuration in your ~/.zshrc file, but want to use Dotmatrix, then move your file to a local version:

$ mv ~/.zshrc ~/.zshrc.local

Take a look at the list of files in Dotmatrix and then look at your own configuration to see which files you'd like to maintain a local version of.

Installing Dotmatrix on a brand new machine is easy. Start by cloning the repo down, maybe in a ~/Project folder or something like that:

$ git clone git://github.com/hashrocket/dotmatrix.git

Then just go into that directory and run bin/install.

This installer script will respect local versions of dot files and then create symlinks to its set of dot files.

If a given dotfile already exists, then that particular file will NOT be over-ridden. On the one hand, this is nice because you can't accidentally lose something, but it also means that you wont get some of the goodies in dotmatrix if you unwittingly leave a dot file around, so pay attention to the output to ensure it's doing what you want.

To upgrade your dotmatrix install go back to the folder where you cloned it and run bin/upgrade. It will fetch the latest and greatest from the GitHub repo and then run the installer script all over again.

Another big part of Dotmatrix is the Vim setup that's been built-in. To get this part, after an install or upgrade run this:

$ bin/vimbundles.sh

We use a LOT of Vim plugins and this will grab those and get you all set.

Maybe you'd like to just grab some of the files in Dotmatrix, maybe just our Git shortcuts, for example--no prob, just do a partial install!

This is great for those that are new to Dotmatrix and want to just check out some part of it, here are some partial installs that might work for you:

Create a file called FILES in the Dotmatrix folder with just this line:

.gitconfig

This will get you our Git aliases and some other cool configuration.

To grab just the Vim parts of Dotmatrix, create that same FILES file in the Dotmatrix folder and have this in it:

.vim
.vimrc

And then be sure to run the bin/vimbundles.sh command.

Maybe you've heard great things about Z shell and want to try it out--no prob, grab our ZSH config and you'll be glad you did. Put this in the FILES file:

.hashrc
.zsh
.zshrc

Don't forget to run chsh -s /path/to/zsh too--that's what switches your shell.

So, that's Dotmatrix--give it a spin and I think you'll find some great stuff. One last thing to note is that this project is fairly active, so be sure to upgrade often for the latest goodies!