dotfiles

Here’s my dotfiles, inspired by people like Mathias. See his dotfiles at https://github.com/mathias/dotfiles.

The idea I’m currently going down is to create a symlink from $HOME to this directory. There is one exception to this, the .gitconfig file. I don’t want actual commiter details committed into this repo, and they differ per machine anyway — this Mac signs with my work address, the iMac with my personal one.

So identity and signing live in an untracked $HOME/.gitconfig.local, which the tracked gitconfig pulls in with an [include] as its last directive. Last matters: git applies config in file order, so anything after the include would override it.

$HOME/.gitconfig is copied rather than symlinked, so that an ad-hoc git config --global writes into $HOME instead of dirtying this repo. The trade-off is that git pull alone does not update it — re-run ./bootstrap.sh, or cp gitconfig ~/.gitconfig, after changing the tracked copy.

Usage

First clone the repo.

Run ./bootstrap.sh, this will create all the necessary symlinks, then source .zshrc.

Warning

This is a destructive process, so backup your dotfiles first.

As mentioned above, git identity lives in an untracked $HOME/.gitconfig.local. bootstrap.sh seeds it from gitconfig.local.template if it does not already exist, and never overwrites an existing one. Fill it in:

[user]
    name = Jonny Barnes
    email = jonny@jonnybarnes.uk
    signingkey = ssh-ed25519 AAAA...

[commit]
    gpgsign = true

[gpg "ssh"]
    program = /Applications/1Password.app/Contents/MacOS/op-ssh-sign

Do not skip this. Git will not prompt you — with no identity it quietly derives one from your username and hostname, warns once, and signs nothing.

$HOME/.extra is a separate untracked file for other machine-local environment variables, sourced from .zshrc. Keep git out of it:

Important

Never put git config --global in .extra. It is re-sourced on every SIGUSR1, so with several tmux panes the concurrent writes race on ~/.gitconfig.lock and spew error: could not lock config file. Put git settings in .gitconfig.local instead.

Fork workflow

Work repos are forks: origin is mine, upstream is the one PRs are raised against. git sync — bin/git-sync, found as a subcommand because it is on the $PATH — does the start-of-work dance:

git sync     # fast-forward the default branch from upstream, push it to origin

It asks the server which branch is the default rather than assuming main, fast-forwards only (a diverged default branch is something to look at, not to merge), and pushes to origin so the fork's copy matches. Then branch off it as usual, push the branch to origin, and raise the PR against upstream.

The awkward part is that git caches the default branch and does not refresh it. refs/remotes/origin/HEAD is written once, at clone time; the default remote.<name>.followRemoteHEAD = create only fills it in when missing. So BuildEmpire/Totara renaming its default from main to totara-20 left every clone still reporting main — git default-branch included. Two things fix that: followRemoteHEAD = always in the gitconfig re-points the ref on every fetch, and git sync sets it explicitly from what the server just said.

Anything wanting the base branch should read that ref, and prefer origin when doing so. git remote sorts alphabetically, so picking the first remote in be-edition returns kdog — a colleague's fork. nvim's <leader>gm (diff-against-branch) tries origin, then upstream, then the rest.

One wrinkle: setting remote.origin.followRemoteHEAD at all is enough for git to invent the remote, so git remote lists a URL-less origin in repos that have none — this one, whose remotes are forge and github. It is a listing artefact, not a real remote: git remote get-url origin still fails, so the origin guard in git sync and the fallbacks in <leader>gm behave.

Light and dark mode

Most of this is now handled natively and needs no configuration:

• ghostty follows the system appearance itself via theme = light:tangere-light.conf,dark:tangere-dark.conf.
• tmux 3.6+ learns the terminal’s theme over OSC 2031 and exposes it as #{client_theme}.
• bat picks a theme per invocation from BAT_THEME_LIGHT / BAT_THEME_DARK.
• delta and nvim detect the terminal background themselves.

The tmux status bar needs help, because its colours are set explicitly. They live in tmux-light.conf and tmux-dark.conf — the same layout, with each colour taken from the matching tangere palette index — and tmux sources one of them from three hooks:

• client-light-theme / client-dark-theme react to a change,
• client-attached picks the right one for a client that attaches mid-way, since the two above only fire on a change.

Because this keys off the terminal's reported theme rather than a schedule, it behaves identically whether the change came from Auto at sunrise/sunset or from toggling Light/Dark by hand — nothing in the chain knows why it changed.

Note

A running nvim will not follow a live change: the docs are explicit that the TUI sets background on startup if it can detect it. New instances are fine — verified, a fresh nvim in light mode reports background=light — but existing ones need :set background=light or a restart.

Verified in light mode: the status bar switches in the same second the hook fires, a fresh nvim detects light, and delta resolves its light default (syntax-theme = GitHub, against Monokai Extended on dark).

Tip

When adding these hooks to an already running tmux server, detach and reattach. tmux enables the terminal’s theme-reporting mode when a client attaches, so a client that predates the hooks never gets asked to report changes — #{client_theme} still reads correctly, because that is answered by a direct query, but no hook fires until the client reattaches.

Note

This previously used dark-mode-notify as a launchd agent that ran pkill -usr1 zsh on every appearance change. That has been removed. It could never have worked: re-sourcing .zshrc runs inside each shell, but the status bar belongs to the tmux server and colours to a running nvim, so it could not retheme either. The one variable it set was read by nothing. Meanwhile it fired on every unlock, re-running .zshrc in every pane. Don’t bring it back.