Terminal Mathias’s dotfiles .functions

Question

I recently got Mathias’s dotfiles on my terminal, and I mainly have two questions about this repo.

First: I can't make my custom aliases / functions get to work. I writing them in the default location of Mathias’s dotfiles, in .aliases / .functions. I do reload .bash_profile after I added and saved the code.

Second: How can I keep up to date with updates automatically while in the meanwhile I have custom aliases and functions setup in .aliases / .functions at the default location of Mathias’s repo. ( /Users/TheSpiritMolecule/dotfiles )

Answer 1

Glad to hear you like my dotfiles :)

First: I can't make my custom aliases / functions get to work. I writing them in the default location of Mathias’s dotfiles, in .aliases / .functions. I do reload .bash_profile after I added and saved the code.

What have you tried? Please describe in detail what you did exactly: which files you edited, which aliases/functions you added. Are you sure you’re editing the ~/.aliases and ~/.functions and not the files in the repository?

Second: How can I keep up to date with updates automatically while in the meanwhile I have custom aliases and functions setup in .aliases / .functions at the default location of Mathias’s repo. ( /Users/TheSpiritMolecule/dotfiles )

The idea is that you don’t use my dotfiles directly, but rather create your own fork of my repository. That way, you can always merge any changes that I made, and that you like, back into your fork through the magic that is Git.

If for some reason you really don’t want to create a fork, you can still add custom aliases and functions by creating an ~/.extra file. That file will never be part of the repository so it won’t cause any merge conflicts, but my dotfiles will source it if such a file exists, along with the other files. You can use this to add a few custom commands without the need to fork this entire repository, or to add commands you don’t want to commit to a public repository.

My ~/.extra looks something like this:

# Git credentials
# Not in the repository, to prevent people from accidentally committing under my name
GIT_AUTHOR_NAME="Mathias Bynens"
GIT_COMMITTER_NAME="$GIT_AUTHOR_NAME"
git config --global user.name "$GIT_AUTHOR_NAME"
GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="[email protected]"
GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL="$GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL"
git config --global user.email "$GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL"

You could also use ~/.extra to override settings, functions and aliases from my dotfiles repository. It’s probably better to fork this repository instead, though.