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Sabrina
Sabrina

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Dotfile management on Linux with Git

So, now that I've got my initial dotfiles sync setup done on Mac, it's time to try porting it over to WSL! You might notice this is a super short snippet of a post, which in this case is a good thing. Homebrew is able to run on linux, so I just needed to follow these instructions to get it running. Since I also wanted to use my same set of dotfiles cross platform, I did need to make a few small changes to those.

First, in my .zshrc I needed to alias brew to the linux install when the operating system is linux. I added the lines below to achieve this.

if [[ $OSTYPE == "gnu-linux" ]]; then
        eval $(/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/bin/brew shellenv)
fi
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Other than that I did need to update a few aliases to no longer reference file paths specifically and instead use $HOME which, since we're on linux, works well enough.

What about files that are for Mac specific apps? I mentioned using iTerm scripting in my first post, and I do version control those scripts. How should I ignore them on platforms that don't need to be concerned with them?

For these files I ran git update-index --assume-unchanged and then deleted the local file. This is pretty manual still, but there are very few incompatible files that I needed to run it for. I’ll probably try to automate things a bit more in the next part when we move to Windows!

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