my dotfiles

i spent an embarrassing amount of time moving pixels around so i wouldn’t have to move my hands around. here’s what stuck.

speed, consistency, and stubbornness

terminal-first on macOS, i tried to replicate my prior linux workflow. Gruvbox personally is easier on the eyes for those late night coding sessions where you realize it’s 4am and you were supposed to sleep three hours ago.

kitty

i switched to kitty from alacritty because why stop at just distro-hopping? it’s written in python and uses OpenGL, which sounds like someone made a joke but actually works great.

block cursor feels right, unfocused windows get the hollow one so you can tell where you are when you’re bouncing between six tmux panes. hide_window_decorations keeps it clean.

one of the many reasons i moved to kitty was the config system doesn’t make me want to throw my keeb out the window.

tmux

tmux is the reason i don’t lose my mind. prefix remapped to ctrl+a because ctrl+b is a crime against your left hand. vim navigation because switching from homerow to arrow keys is annoying. windows renumber automatically so you don’t get gaps and spend twenty minutes trying to remember why there’s a hole between 2 and 4.

the plugin situation:

• tpm because managing plugins by hand is a special kind of pain
• tmux-sensible for defaults that just works
• vim-tmux-navigator for ctrl+hjkl pane switching. seamless.
• tmux-resurrect and tmux-continuum because i crash my machine often enough that manual session recovery is not a viable lifestyle

karabiner

on macOS, karabiner elements is the only way to make the keyboard feel like it belongs to you instead of apple + helps me set up my keybindings the way i feel home at.

caps lock as hyper (shift+cmd+ctrl+option). so you get a whole new set of shortcuts without accidentally closing your browser or something stupid. tap it once = escape. hold it = hyper. vim-friendly, which is the whole point.

the gruvbox thing

tmux, kitty, alacritty, all gruvbox. warm, earthy, retro but readable. i’ve tried other themes. i always come back. there’s probably a lesson there about attachment to familiar things but let’s not get philosophical about a color scheme.

closing

your dotfiles should feel like home. don’t just clone someone else’s repo and call it a day. steal what works, break what doesn’t, make it yours. that’s the whole point.

repo’s linked if you want to steal anything. thanks for reading.