dotfiles

Managed as a bare git repo checked out over $HOME. Not cloned in the usual sense — git --git-dir=~/.dotfiles --work-tree=$HOME treats $HOME itself as the working tree.

Everyday use

A fish function named dot wraps that invocation:

dot status
dot add .bashrc
dot commit -m 'update bashrc'
dot push

Any git subcommand works — dot forwards whatever you type straight to git.

Bootstrapping a new machine

Before dot exists there's nothing to autoload it from, so the very first step is fetching that one file by hand:

mkdir -p ~/.config/fish/functions
curl -fsSL https://git.alexion.dev/alexion/dotfiles/raw/branch/main/.config/fish/functions/dot.fish \
    -o ~/.config/fish/functions/dot.fish
fish -c 'dot init'

dot init:

• clones the bare repo to ~/.dotfiles
• backs up any pre-existing files that would be overwritten by checkout into ~/.dotfiles-backup/<timestamp>/
• checks out the tracked files onto $HOME
• sets status.showUntrackedFiles=no so dot status doesn't list all of $HOME

It refuses to run if ~/.dotfiles already exists, and it never falls back to creating a fresh empty repo if the clone fails.

Adding new subcommands

Beyond init, dot looks for ~/.config/dot/commands/<name>.fish. Each file should define a _dot_<name> function; dot <name> args... sources the file and calls it. These files are deliberately not under ~/.config/fish/functions/, so they never become independently invokable commands or clutter tab-completion outside of dot itself.

~/.config/fish/completions/dot.fish discovers them automatically by scanning that directory, so a new command file gets tab-completion for free.