The Dotfile as Autobiography

Week 4. Every decision you made and then forgot you made.

Configuration is prose

It has an author, a voice, and passages clearly written by a different, more optimistic person.

Read a config, read a person

  • their habits, their irritations, the tutorial they followed at 2am
  • the keybinding that once cost them an afternoon
  • a folder of backups is not this; a history is

Version control is memory

A setup with no git history is a life with no diary. You cannot say when a choice was made or why, only that it now exists.

$ git log --oneline
a1b2c3d hypr: kill the screen tear on the second monitor at last
9f8e7d6 waybar: drop the weather module, never once read it
4c3b2a1 theme: move to catppuccin mocha across terminal and editor
0d1e2f3 initial dotfiles

The problem the course circles

A setup that lives only on your machine is not reproducible. A rice that cannot be rebuilt is a photograph of a place that no longer exists.

Before next week

Put your config under git if it is not already. Write the first commit message as though a stranger will read it, because one will.