devmachine is a new way of managing tools and dotfiles on your dev machine.

After a fresh install, there are 2 main tasks to get a machine ready for coding: 1) install stuff, then 2) configure stuff. #1 is easy and handled by tools like pacman and homebrew. But there's a real disconnect between installing and dotfile management. The "best practice" is to just throw all the dots up on GitHub, symlink some stuff, and call it a day (hell, that's what I used to do http://github.com/keithpitt/dotfiles/) but the issue is that after a while, that config starts to drift, you add things, remove things, and it eventually becomes the "junk drawer" for your stuff.

Keeping dotfiles in sync across machines is also a bit of a challenge (not a challenge that this project is taking on right way) but the main purpose here, is to provide a framework/layout of how to better organize the tools you "care about". Do I care about Postgres config? No. Redis? No. Vim? Yes. Ghostty? Yes. The tools I drive on a daily basis are highly tuned to my workflow, so they should be treated better, not just have their configs thrown in a repo.

devmachine supports both zsh and bash (3.2+). devmachine takes over the entire bootstrap process of yyour shell. Each tool defines it's own shellenv that's injected into the shell boot process. This means instead of cluttering your .bashrc and .zshrc files with a bunch of random stuff, this is all you need:

export DEVMACHINE_PATH="/Users/keithpitt/Code/devmachine"
eval "$($DEVMACHINE_PATH/bin/devmachine shellenv $(which ${0#-}))"

This repo currently merges the tooling as well as my own dev configuration. At some point I'll split them, but this is the way it is for now.

Here's how it all works:

There are 2 main commands included:

1. devmachine is the main control for all the tools
2. devtool individual tool control

Running devmachine will list all the tools installed:

$ devmachine tools
bash 5.2.37(1)-release
bat 0.25.0
btop btop
curl 8.7.1
delta 0.18.2
docker 28.1.1,
fastfetch 2.43.0
yazi 25.4.8
zip 3.0
zoxide 0.9.7
zsh 5.9

The tools I care about are listed in the tools/ folder.

Each tool is a bash script that looks like this:

#!/usr/bin/env devtool

GHOSTTY_CONFIG_PATH="${GHOSTTY_CONFIG_PATH:-$HOME/.config/ghostty}"

case "$1" in

  logo)
    ui::image "$DEVMACHINE_PATH/tools/ghostty/logo.png" 17 10
    ;;

  setup)
    os::install "ghostty"

    # https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/pull/1102/files
    os::sh touch "$HOME/.hushlogin"

    os::linkfile "$DEVMACHINE_PATH/tools/ghostty/config" "$GHOSTTY_CONFIG_PATH/config"
    ;;

  config)
    "$EDITOR" "$GHOSTTY_CONFIG_PATH/config"
    ;;

  --check-installed)
    command -v ghostty &> /dev/null && echo yes
    ;;

  --check-version)
    ghostty --version | head -n 1 | sed 's/Ghostty //'
    ;;

esac

It's basically a bash case statement with various actions against the tool. When you run devtool ghostty on your machine, it shows this:

Prety cool!

That's all it does for now. I haven't run the tooling against my arch linux setup yet, so I'd like to get hyprland and waybar all in here. Then split out the tooling from my config, then I can ship it so everone can use it!

You can use it now if you want, but it's very custom to me.

devmachine caches all the shell setup so subsequent runs are fast. On a cold start (for me at least) my shell takes around 100ms to start. From cached, it's about 10ms. If things get weird, run devmachine cachebust