This is a place to put my Linux/Darwin/Unix dotfiles. It's grown by accretion and evolution, 1992-ish onwards. See also http://github.com/johnkerl/scripts.

• Must work on MacOS and Linux, with minimal tweaking or duplication.
  • I don't attempt any other OS support, including NetBSD, etc.
• Must work on zsh and bash both, with minimal tweaking or duplication.
• Modularity:
  • Must function for my personal and work setups.
  • Must function for different employers.
  • Must not expose secrets.
  • Must not be a single .bashrc or .zshrc with hundreds of lines in it, with if-statements.
• Must be low-latency install:
  • Whenever I get a new laptop (which is infrequent).
  • Whenever I spin up a new EC2 instance (which is more frequent).
  • Any other ephemeral configurations (bashing into a Docker image for example).
• Must be stable over time.
  • Many of my dotfiles and scripts are (as of 2026) ten, twenty, or thirty years old. Something may break someday on a new system somewhere, and my memory won't be fresh.

What I do to accommodate these goals:

• MacOS and Linux: Very few changes are needed. Checking uname for Darwin suffices for me.
• zsh/bash: I use a single .bzrc.
• Modularity, including personal/work split, and working for different employers: top-level .bzrc looks at .bzrcs-public/, .bzrcs-private, and .bzrcs-work.
  • .bzrcs-public/ is for this repo.
  • .bzrcs-private/ is for a private, personal-dotfiles repo.
  • .bzrcs-work/ is for employer-specific things, such as project-specific aliases.
  • .secrets is for API keys, etc. that I never check into source control.
  • All but the last are directories with specific things in them. I can put prompt configs in one file, project-specific aliases in another, etc.
• Low-latency install: I have scripts like download-and-install.sh.
• Stability over time: I comment liberally so that one day when something changes unexpectedly, I can figure out what's going on and fix it.

Run either or both of these from within a checkout of this repo:

• bash ./install-dotfiles.sh does setup of this repo's files.
• bash ./install-full.sh does setup of some of my other utility repos.

./download-and-install.sh can be run in curl:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/johnkerl/dotfiles/refs/heads/main/install-dotfiles.sh | bash

That clones this repo to ~/git/johnkerl/dotfiles, then cd's there and runs bash ./install-dotfiles.sh.

ln -s $(pwd)/bashrc         ~/.bashrc
ln -s $(pwd)/zshrc          ~/.zshrc
ln -s $(pwd)/bzrcs-public   ~/.bzrcs-public
ln -s $(pwd)/ctags          ~/.ctags
ln -s $(pwd)/screenrc       ~/.screenrc
ln -s $(pwd)/vanilla        ~/.vanilla
ln -s $(pwd)/vimrc          ~/.vimrc
ln -s $(pwd)/R/environ      ~/.Renviron
ln -s $(pwd)/R/profile      ~/.Rprofile

You may need to add to ~/.bash_profile:

. ~/.bashrc

See also https://github.com/johnkerl/scripts/tree/master/suitcase and https://github.com/johnkerl/away for other remote-setup options.

• At installation, ~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc, ~/.screenrc, ~/.vimrc are symlinked to point to this repo's bashrc, zshrc, screenrc, vimrc here.
• ~/.bzrcs-public/ is symlinked to point to bzrcs-public/here.
• ~/.bashrc and ~/.zshrc source ~/.bzrcs-public/init. The bz reflects the fact that these scripts work with bash and zsh both.
• ~/.bzrcs-public/init is responsible for sourcing the other files in its directory.
• If ~/.bzrcs-private/ (a symlink to a directory containing an init file) and/or ~/.bzrc-work (a symlink to a file) are present, they'll be sourced as well.