It's been on my todo list for a long time but I finally got round to putting some of the command line config into a repo. The tipping point came because we got given a whole bunch of remote servers at work to build and run tooling and experiments on. It was only when working in an uncustomised environment that I realised how much configuration I had setup and how much it improved my day to day work flow.
Easy to setup config
My config is up on github and is installable from the command line using curl. Simple and easy to get up and running anywhere.
What is configured.
The main change for me over the past year has been to operate increasingly in vim (having used vim bindings in Intellij and Sublime for a while). Vim is especially handy to get to grips with when dealing with remote servers. Vim out of the box is good but getting it to work even better takes
The other tool that I have been using is tmux. Initially the main benefit of tmux was that I could run a process from inside a tmux session so that when I closed the ssh session to the box the process would remain running. From starting off using it as a necessity I have started using it in my day to day workflow to allow me to have multiple tabs open in one screen and to have set projects or folders always open together. I find it especially useful in that when I log onto a box there are clearly labeled sessions with the appropriate file and folders open that I usually tweak so find it easy to get back in the flow of a project.
Aliasing
Finally command line aliases speed up my day today work. The three I use most are hg. This stands for history | grep which gives me a nudge on when I have used something previously. The other two go hand in hand: gb and gcb. The first runs a script that lists all the local branches in a current repo in the order they were last checked out. This is a huge help - I am often swapping between a number of branches when working on stories, code reviewing others code as well as running release processes. I can remember what I was working on but can't remember the exact branch name. Listing the top 15 in order allows me to easily spot the one I was working on. There is a number alongside the list of branches and I can run gcb $number to checkout that branch! Super userful and helpful and helps speed up my development process.
Summary
Having a centralised config has been super helpful. For my main setup instead of running the install command I symlink to the appropriate file so that I always update the central repo whenever I add some config. On my todo list is an easy way for other boxes to automatically check for updates and pull in the changes. Having a roughly unified experience wherever I am has been a huge help. I'll be looking to add more config and other applications to the repo. The other area I want to tackle is the tech and applications I install on a new laptop (brew, ruby, node etc.) Watch this space...