Reloading command line tools

This is the set of tools that I use for day-to-day activity. Each major component will include each of it's copy-and-paste install instructions, assuming that you are working from the base directory of this repository. To allow changes to be reflected immediately after any edits, all custom files will be soft-linked to the required repositories.

The repository is slowly transitioning into using nix home-manager for bootstrapping all the configurations to the home directory. When it is complete, the installation process should be directly:

git clone https://github.com/yimuchen/dotfiles
rm ~/.config/home-manager -rf                     # Removing existing home-manager configuration
ln <path >/ <to >/dofiles ~/.config/home-manager/ # Linking this repository to home manager
home-manager switch                               # Is required to rerun if you make edits to the dotfiles directory

While the bootstrapping is being finalized, additional instructions will be provided to ensure that configurations can still be used (especially for system where nix is still not available)

What should be handled by nix?

Using nix as the package manager does not quite solve the problem of all configuration managements methods that can exist for the packages that we can use. The rule of thumb would be:

• If the configurations contain programmable logic (like with neovim and zsh), the configuration should always attempt to use the packages native configuration method rather than using nix. Nix in this case will be used to set up links to the configuration.
• If the configurations dependencies packages that uses is not native to the configuration language (like language specific tools for neovim, or wrappers to make certain CLI tools easier to use), these should be handled as nix dependencies. This is mainly to help ensure that consistent development session can be configured with nix flake files.
• All setting up of symbolic links for various configurations that are not easily handled by existing home manager configuration options. The miscellaneous configuration files in this case would be listed under the config and the share directory. And the structure within this directory should mirror what is expected in the $HOME/.config and $HOME/.local/share directory respectively.

Shell (zsh)

The additional plugin system used will be antidote, while the downloading of packages defined by antidote will be handled by nix. This ensures that the configured system will have a fully functioning zsh, and you will not be prompted with a message when first logging into the shell.

Aliases for standard coreutils tools, and some non-trivial combination of such tools will be defined in the nix configurations. Programmable configurations should be defined in the separate zsh/*.sh files, such that they can be quickly updated when running into a bug without having to rebuild the system.

Shell helper scripts

Additional helper scripts used for performing common routines in a CLI session should be store in subdirectories in the zsh folder. The individual nix configurations used for grouping terminal functionality would be used to expose these directories and the global $PATH variable. The scripts here should use vanilla sh where ever possible, as avoid using nix specific paths to complete the routine (i.e: the script should expected executable files to be exposed instead of pointing to a specific nix executable instance), as this ensure the same scripts can be ported to other systems that is not running Nix.

Python helper scripts

For more complicated routines, python scripts with subprocess is a little easier to handle than bash scripts. Such tools will be provided in the pyscripts directory. The nontrivial python dependencies are listed in the pyscripts/requirements.txt file, though you should instead use the system package manager to install these python dependencies. Once you have installed the python dependencies, the scripts can be enabled run the following commands:

# Linking scripts to the common position
ln -sf $PWD/pyscripts $HOME/.pyscripts

# If this line is not already somewhere in your shell configurations
export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.pyscripts

# Ensuring that python auto complete is main available (scripts can still be used is not done)
activate-global-python-argcomplete --user

Neovim configuration

The organization of neovim configurations follows the example found in the tutorial made by the ThePrimeagen. As the configuration of neovim also runs into external dependency management, this should always be coupled with the other session configurations (see the README.md file in the nvim directory for more information).

On the initial start up the lazy package manager should automatically start pulling the required packages. For how the neovim configuration is done, see the documentation in nvim/README.md file.

Latex settings

Custom latex aliasing, symbols and styling files. This is mainly for standalone documents generate without minimum document format restrictions and not publication ready. For any serious publications, it would be better to directly create a separate copy to ensure the object styles are properly frozen.

The packages here expected most of the common texlive packages for math writing are installed in the system (which should be the case after installing the more common texlive-* packages from the official Arch repository) Some external dependencies might be needed for the font configuration to function. For additional details, see the texmf/tex/latex/README.

Plasma configurations

Currently, plasma configurations are not easily performed by nix, we will be keeping track of the required rc files in the plasma directory. The file structure in the plasma should follow how the files are structured in the ~/.config directory. The construction of the symlink as well as why certain items are required to kept will be handled by nix home-manager.

Miscellaneous

Miscellaneous configuration that we will be using for the commonly used "vanilla" unix system, such as vim instead of neovim, bash instead of zsh and so on. These files will not be managed by nix/home-manager, and should be directly modified/copied to the target file.