Dotfiles

1. $ git clone --bare git@github.com:jkugelman/dotfiles.git .dotfiles

   Clone the dotfiles repository from GitHub.

2. $ dotfiles() { git --git-dir="$HOME"/.dotfiles --work-tree="$HOME" "$@"; }

   Set up an alias to send Git commands to .dotfiles, and also set $HOME as the work tree, while storing the Git state at .dotfiles.

3. $ dotfiles checkout

   Copy the actual files from the .dotfiles repository to $HOME. Git pulls the tracked files out of the compressed database in the Git directory and places them in the work tree.

   dotfiles checkout might fail with a message like:

   error: The following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by checkout:
       .bashrc
       .gitignore
   Please move or remove them before you can switch branches.
   Aborting
   

   Files on your computer might have identical locations and names as the files in the .dotfiles repo. Git doesn't want to overwrite your local files. Back up the files if they're useful; delete them if they aren't.

(These steps were adapted from The best way to store your dotfiles: A bare Git repository EXPLAINED.)

Adding new files

Because $HOME is the work tree, ~/.gitignore ignores everything by default and opts in only to the directories whose new files should be tracked automatically — .claude/skills/, .vim/plugin/, and friends. Without it a dotfiles add -A would sweep the whole home directory into this public repo: caches, shell history, and real secrets like .cargo/credentials.

Git ignores nothing that is already tracked, so this only governs new files. Deliberately not opted in are ~/.ssh (keys), ~/.local/bin (mixed in with pip and npm console shims), and new top-level dotfiles — tracking those should be a conscious choice:

$ dotfiles add -f ~/.newrc

(The blog post above instead sets status.showUntrackedFiles no, which only hides untracked files rather than protecting them, and has to be re-run by hand on every machine because --local config isn't cloned.)

Command-line tools

A few tools these configs reference aren't tracked in the repo — install them per machine:

• bacon — background Rust checker, configured by .config/bacon/prefs.toml. cargo install bacon, or brew install bacon on macOS.
• delta — the Git pager, set as core.pager. cargo install git-delta, or brew install git-delta on macOS.
• git-revise — history-editing helper (git revise). pipx install git-revise.
• tree — directory-tree lister, wrapped by common.shrc. Ships with or packages for most Linux distros (apt install tree); brew install tree on macOS, which has no system copy.

Terminal key mappings

Claude Code submits on Enter and inserts a newline on Shift+Enter. Terminals transmit bytes rather than keypresses, though, and Enter is already a control character — CR is 0x0d — with no modifier bits left to spare, so Shift+Enter arrives indistinguishable from a bare Enter and the newline binding never fires. Recovering the distinction takes a mapping in the terminal itself, the last layer that still knows Shift was held: it sends ESC CR instead, which is what Claude Code reads as "insert a newline".

/terminal-setup installs that mapping on the terminals it knows how to configure, VS Code and iTerm2 among them. It does not cover Windows Terminal — it classifies it as supporting Shift+Enter natively, which does not hold over WSL. (It also identifies the terminal by WT_SESSION, which WSL may not pass through even when WSLENV lists it, in which case Claude Code does not recognize Windows Terminal at all.)

Windows Terminal therefore needs it by hand, in settings.json — an entry in actions and the key that triggers it in keybindings:

{ "command": { "action": "sendInput", "input": "\u001b\r" },
  "id": "User.sendInput.ShiftEnter" }

{ "id": "User.sendInput.ShiftEnter", "keys": "shift+enter" }

That file lives at %LOCALAPPDATA%\Packages\Microsoft.WindowsTerminal_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState\settings.json, and the terminal reloads it on save. A raw ESC byte is not valid inside a JSON string, so the input has to be spelled as the \u001b\r escape above.

The mapping lives in the terminal's own settings, out of this repo's reach, so it is per machine. Ctrl+J and a trailing backslash insert a newline with no mapping at all, so a machine that hasn't been set up is inconvenient rather than unusable.

Docker

$ curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com | sudo sh
$ sudo systemctl enable docker