Sharpen and clean your tools to make them last longer. Hone your tools to make them more precise. The tools of a SRE start with the terminal. The terminal is honed sharp with dotfiles.
Live your life long enough in a terminal and tweaks and customizations happen. Live longer and when those tweaks are lost from a catastrophe or when you switch machines, you will be hamstrung and saddened going back to nothing.
Phase 1: maintain my dot files for tmux, bash, git and vim in a GitHub repo, and then manually symlink from the repo to my home directory.
Phase 2: automate all of the configuration setup process and the supporting software.
Complexity 1: half a dozen machines.
Complexity 2: the machines were split between Mac and linux.
Complexity 3: a couple of the linux VMs, want to be run as root.-Rage note about root- These are kali and security distributions that are not meant to be long lived, but I will be on the long enough to want a toolset.
The dot files are arranged in a shell script that will be run and then the proper bash git tmux and vim files are symlinked and used based on the os and the user that I am running as.
If there is anything that I’ve done horribly wrong with these I would really like to hear about it, these are the dot files that I have dragged around and revised for the past 5 years now or so, and we all know that looking at anything that was written even 6 months ago, we can think of way better ways of doing things.
it is certainly nothing flashy but the majority of the tweaks are the keyboard shortcuts
Let’s dive right in.