It’s a new year, and I thought I learn something new to increase productivity.

I stumbled upon Dotfiles when watching a Google I/O 2012 video (awesome video on web tools btw).

Dotfiles are hidden files, such as .bash_profile and .aliases, which you edited to suit your workflow for your Mac.

Because everyone has their own ‘dotfiles’, it makes sense to share.

Hence some of the best Dotfiles are on GitHub.

I recommend starting with Mathias version, which is a de facto for Mac OS X.

Steps:

1. Backup your current dotfiles. For example, I already have .bash_profile and .gitconfig, so I copy them to dotfiles_backup.

2. Fork Mathias Dotfiles, then git clone your fork instead. Highly recommended to fork because you will most likely make some changes.

3. Read through the dotfiles. Example read .bash_profile, edit, and also merge from your dotfiles_backup as necessary.

4. In the cloned repos, source bootstrap.sh.

5. Read through and edit .osx, then run ./.osx once.

Here’s my very own version which deactivated some stuff that I don’t need, and modified for my needs.