Comment by chis
1 year ago
I think it's more likely to say that this comes from a place of laziness than some enlightened peak. (I say this as someone who does the same, and is lazy).
When I watch the work of coworkers or friends who have gone these rabbit holes of customization I always learn some interesting new tools to use - lately I've added atuin, fzf, and a few others to my linux install
I went through a similar cycle. Going back to simplicity wasn't about laziness for me, it was because i started working across a bunch more systems and didn't want to do my whole custom setup on all of them, especially ephemeral stuff like containers allocated on a cluster for a single job. So rather than using my fancy setup sometimes and fumbling through the defaults at other times, i just got used to operating more efficiently with the defaults.
You can apply your dotfiles to servers you SSH into rather easily. I'm not sure what your workflow is like but frameworks like zsh4humans have this built in, and there are tools like sshrc that handle it as well. Just automate the sync on SSH connection. This also applies to containers if you ssh into them.
I'm guessing you haven't worked in Someone Else's environment?
The amount of shit you'll get for "applying your dotfiles" on a client machine or a production server is going to be legendary.
Same with containers, please don't install random dotfiles inside them. The whole point of a container is to be predictable.
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The defaults are unbearable. I prefer using chezmoi to feel at home anywhere. There's no reason I can't at least have my aliases.
I'd rather take the pain of writing scripts to automate this for multiple environments than suffer the death by a thousand cuts which are the defaults.
chezmoi is the right direction, but I don't want to have to install something on the other server, I should just be able to ssh to a new place and have everything already set up, via LocalCommand and Host * in my ~/.ssh/config
Atuin is new to me!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44364186 - June 2025, 71 comments
I gave it a try a few months ago, but did not work for me. My main issue is that atuin broke my workflow with fzf (If I remember correctly, pressing ctrl + r to lookup my shell history did not work well after installing atuin).
I'm sympathetic, also a longtime fzf user here. I install it reflexively on any system I use for more than a day or two.
This is configurable! I use atuin, but fzf with ctrl-r.
I like atuin but why is it so slow when first opening (hitting up) in the shell?
I'd recommend disabling atuin when hitting up and just leave it on ctrl+r instead
Either it wasn't a design goal or they are stupid. Why don't you tell us?
The right way this would work is via a systemd service and then it should be instant.